PPC, SOLUTIONS 8
How to Scale a Performance Max Campaign
Contrary to many people saying that Performance Max campaigns are easy to create and scale, it’s actually one of the most difficult campaign types to build in Google Ads.
There’s a lot involved in creating and managing a successful one, but it can be worth the effort if you want to reach your target audience and make more sales from your ads.
A good way to start is by looking at the best Google Ads strategists scale a Performance Max campaign – this will give you an idea of what comes next and hopefully help you scale your Performance Max campaign and be successful too!
And that’s exactly what this blog is all about, so let’s get started!
Content:
Increase your Performance Max budget to scale your campaign
Supplementary campaigns to run with Performance Max campaigns
The importance of website optimization in scaling your Performance Max campaigns
Increase your Performance Max budget to scale your campaign
The first step that comes to mind with scalability is to increase the campaign budget.
But don’t just increase your budget right away!
For a higher chance of effectively scaling your Performance Max campaign through budget increase, here’s what we recommend:
1. First, give your Performance Max campaign adequate time to gather and analyze all the available data.
Understanding that it takes time to optimize a campaign and position it to scale successfully is crucial.
With Google’s 500 touch point paradigm, Performance Max campaigns undergo a learning period of roughly 45 days.
But that doesn’t mean it’s going to yield great results at Day 46.
Essentially, Day 46 is now Day 0 because it is only after the 45-day learning period that we can see what we’ve built and how it’s going to work.
On average, our Google Ads strategists allow Performance Max campaigns to run for at least a month before increasing the budget.
It’s also important to note that allowing the campaign to run for a certain amount of time means not touching anything in the campaign— not making any changes (not even a small tweak in the setting or asset groups).
2. Second, increase your budget when you start seeing consistency in your Performance Max campaign.
The more tangible way to determine when you can increase your Performance Max campaign budget, other than giving it adequate time to run, is by checking on your goals.
See how you’re campaign is doing, and check for consistency.
With consistency, we mean that you’re nearly hitting your goals or you already have a solid tROAS.
You don’t have to wait to reach your goals to scale a Performance Max campaign.
Even if you’re slightly below your goals, you can start to slowly increase your budget.
3. Slowly increase your budget, don’t pour everything all at once.
Our Google Ads experts recommend increasing budgets by 15-20% gradually, depending on your initial spend.
This is what we mean:
If you’re spending $40-$50 a day, increase your budget by 15-20% and wait for about two to three weeks for your campaign to collect enough data.
This allows time for you to see if increasing your budget resulted in your favor. If it did, increase your budget again by 15-20% and wait for another two weeks before increasing your budget once more.
On the other hand, if you have a large budget, say you’re already spending $100-$200 a day, you’re good to just increase your budget after every week.
This is based on the principle that Google’s machine learning learns faster when it’s given more budget to spend.
Supplementary campaigns to run with Performance Max campaigns
If you already have a solid tROAS but you’re cautious about increasing your budget, another way to scale a Performance Max campaign is to run the following supplementary campaigns:
1. DSA Campaigns
The easiest supplementary campaign to run when scaling your Performance Max campaign is a DSA campaign for all your products.
Let it run and after you reach 30-40 conversions, hit it with a target CPA, and you’ll see that it will perform really well.
But you’ll have to expect that it will fluctuate every week: one week it will do really well and other weeks it will be disappointing.
This is because it’s as if Google is going back and forth between the audiences between Performance Max and DSA so expect that fluctuation to show up in your DSA campaign.
That’s normal so don’t worry about it, you’ll see in the long run that it will help yield good results in scaling your Performance Max campaign.
2. Inbound Campaigns
Determine the best performing keywords in your Performance Max campaign, and use all of them in an inbound campaign.
Start a regular search campaign in broad match, and put a target CPA on it.
Here’s the trick:
Don’t put in the tCPA that you want, increase it. Add about 20% to your “real” tCPA and put that in.
This is because you’re aiming to scale so don’t set a limit on your campaign.
Leave your campaign running for two to three weeks before you gradually drop the tCPA to your “real” goal.
3. YouTube Ads
If you have good marketing videos, running YouTube Ads will help scale a Performance Max campaign.
In your Performance Max campaign, take your best-performing keywords and audiences and use those to build your YouTube Ads.
YouTube Ads are great Discovery campaigns for cold traffic.
This helps target more of the right audiences to come to you.
Read on our ultimate guide to Google Ads for YouTube to learn more about creating high-converting YouTube Ads from start to finish.
The importance of website optimization in scaling your Performance Max campaigns
With Performance Max, you don’t choose the destination to where your ads show up in the Google network, or where on your website the user lands when they click.
Google now does this using a feature called URL expansion.
This feature inside asset groups allows Google to scan your site and decide which page of your site to send a user who clicks on your ad, depending on their unique persona and “journey.”
That is why a high-quality website is critical to scale a Performance Max campaign.
You’ll never know where Google will lead your prospects so you always have to be ready!
An optimized website is just one of the many things to help ensure your business is Performance Max ready.
If you want to know what else you need, we created a series of prerequisite checklists in our ultimate guide to Performance Max campaigns to help you start your Performance Max journey the right way.
If you have questions or concerns about Performance Max or anything about Google Ads, you can leave a comment in one of our YouTube videos.
Better yet, you can ask Kasim and John directly during the Weekly LIVE Q&A To Scale Your Business with Google Ads. Catch them every Friday at 1 PM PST as they answer everything you want to know about Google Ads – strategies, secrets, guides, and so much more!
We hope to hear from you on Friday! 💚
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