Additional best practices for advertisers with online sales and offline goals

As the next generation of Smart Shopping and Local campaigns, Google Ads Performance Max is the newest way to achieve your online sales and/or store goals across YouTube, Display, Search, Discovery and more. For omnichannel advertisers with a website and physical locations, Performance Max simplifies managing your online and store presence from a single campaign to capture cross-channel opportunities.

Create new campaigns with Google Ads Performance Max

Set up your campaign

Like Smart Shopping and Local campaigns, Performance Max campaigns are goal-based and can be configured towards online sales, store or omnichannel goals. You can also connect a feed, like your Google Merchant Center product feed or custom dimensions feed, to Performance Max campaigns.

Add a wider range of creative assets

• If you have online sales goals, connecting your product feed to Performance Max campaigns will automatically make it eligible to run. Still, we strongly recommend that you also add a variety of text, image, and video assets, which will allow your Performance Max campaign to serve across more eligible surfaces and inventory to achieve optimal performance. 
  • Creative assets are required to serve ads on store goals formats.
• Ensure that any newly created Performance Max campaign with online sales goals doesn’t contain overlapping products with your existing Smart Shopping campaigns.
• Ensure that any newly created Performance Max campaigns that have store goals exclusively don’t contain overlapping products or creative assets if existing Local campaigns are targeting the same business locations as the newly created Performance Max campaigns.
• If you create a Performance Max campaign for online sales goals with a Google Merchant Center product feed, it is strongly recommended that you include additional creative assets in order to help drive the best performance. If creative assets are not provided, in some cases, we may help auto-generate the following assets on your behalf:
  • Videos are auto-generated based on the provided text and image assets.
  • If you turn on the Final URL expansion feature, headlines and descriptions may be auto-generated for Search text ads based on the provided final URL. (This isn’t available to campaigns that have store goals exclusively.)
  • Headlines and descriptions are auto-generated based on the provided final URL. (This isn’t available to campaigns that have store goals exclusively.)
• If you create a Performance Max campaign for store goals, you must include creative assets, such as headlines, descriptions, calls to action, and a final URL. You may also associate a custom dimensions feed to your campaigns to promote products and promotions available in stores.

View reporting and insights

Dig into how automation is working to help you achieve your online sales and store goals. These actionable insights will help you optimize your creatives and overall campaign performance. 

From the new Insights page, you can view the following:

• Consumer interest insights group search terms into themes to help you understand what consumers are looking for when your ads appear. 
• Audience insights show you the audiences that are most performant for your ads.
• Search trends help you understand search interest related to the products and services you show ads for.

From the Asset groups page at the Campaign level, you’ll also get asset reporting, which shows you how different assets are performing in your campaign and the top-performing combinations of asset types (such as text, images, and videos). This allows you to make strategic decisions on which assets to keep, remove, or improve.

To account for ramp-up time and conversion delays, wait 1 to 2 weeks before evaluating the performance of campaigns with online sales. For campaigns with in-store only or omnichannel goals, allow up to 3 to 4 weeks

Start upgrading your existing Smart Shopping and Local campaigns to Performance Max 

When the upgrade tool is ready for you to use, you’ll be notified in your Google Ads account, where you can initiate the upgrade from the Campaigns page, Recommendations page, or Notifications panel. You can either bulk upgrade all your campaigns at once, or select specific campaigns to upgrade individually.

• Your Smart Shopping and Local campaigns will continue to run until the upgrade process is complete, which should take a day or less. You will be able to keep track of upgrade statuses on your Campaigns page.
• Once your campaigns are upgraded using the “one-click” upgrade tool, your new campaigns will be able to run immediately, with no ramp-up time.
• Even though your previous campaigns will no longer be editable, their performance learnings, budget, settings, and assets will be carried over to Performance Max to ensure performance continuity. You will still be able to view historical data for these campaigns, which will now have a "Removed" status in Google Ads.

Refer to the following milestones related to the upgrade experience:

• Upgrade with one-click tool: Over the coming weeks, a “one-click” upgrade tool will begin rolling out in Google Ads to upgrade your Smart Shopping campaigns. You’ll be able to upgrade your Local campaigns with the tool starting in June.
• Upgrade automatically: From July through September, your Smart Shopping campaigns will be automatically upgraded. Your Local campaigns will be automatically upgraded from August through September. You will no longer be able to create new Smart Shopping and Local campaigns once your existing campaigns are automatically upgraded.
• Conclude upgrades: The upgrade process will conclude by the end of September to give you time to use your Performance Max campaigns for the holiday season.

Learn more about the upgrade process and FAQs.

Related links

• Achieve your goals across Google’s ad channels with Performance Max
• Create a Google Ads Performance Max campaign
• Optimization tips for Google Ads Performance Max
• Fix issues with Performance Max campaigns