The competition for customers and sales is tight. You need to connect with people who are likely to click buy.

This is why you need to take advantage of Google Performance Max ad campaigns.

Done right, Performance Max automatically optimizes your budget and ad bids, connects you with new customers, teaches you about your audience, and ultimately gives you the information you need to create more targeted ads, landing pages, and content.

Get up to speed with Performance Max campaigns and how to optimize it for your health and wellness brand.

What is Google Performance Max?

“Google Performance Max is designed to complement your keyword-based Search campaigns to help you find more converting customers across all of Google’s channels like YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail, and Maps.”

Using real-time information and Google’s automation technologies, Performance Max helps you gain more conversions from your ad campaigns. Google says the key benefits of Performance Max include:

• Unlock new audiences across Google’s channels and networks
• Drive better performance against your goals
• Get more transparent insights
• Steer automation with your campaign inputs
• Simplify campaign management and easily optimize your ads

Performance Max Best Practices for Health Brands

Health brand owners, you need to know these Performance Max best practices:

• Be product specific. Create campaigns, budgets, and targets for specific products.
• Seasonality matters. Make sure your budget, products, and creative assets are specific to the season or holiday promotion.
• Unique content. You need to catch customer attention, the best way to do this is with unique and refreshed content.
• The more assets the better. Create at least 5 unique video, text, image, and content assets.
• Provide lots of data. Performance Max is powered by machine learning, the more it knows, the better your campaign. Use remarketing lists, custom intent, Customer Match, and similar segments as signals.
• Plan in advance. Your campaign needs to run for at least 6 weeks to give the machine learning algorithm time to ramp up.
• Create an audience signal. Google wants to know who your target users are and then looks beyond this to find people with similar interests and habits who are likely to convert and click buy.
• Visuals matter. Customers respond quickly to visuals including images and videos.
• Test and adjust. Learn what works and then adjust your videos, images, and content throughout your campaign.
• E-A-T still matters. Because you are a YMYL brand, you need to make sure your ads adhere to Google’s standards for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
• Keywords. Use campaign- and product-specific keywords that you know meet your target audience’s search intent.
• Pay attention to the ‘Ad Strength’ indicator. Google wants your ads to succeed and will tell you what it thinks of the quality of your ads. Remember, typically Google knows what will and won’t work.
• Creative is core to your campaign. Do not reuse creative content for multiple campaigns. The words, images, and colors you use matter. Only capitalize the first word in your headline and descriptions and nouns – you want your copy to look natural and organic.
• Use the Insights tab. The Insights tab and page help you find trends in the health and wellness market and see how your campaign is performing. Use the information to update your ad campaign, change your creative content, or to even create new campaigns.

Take advantage of all the data that Performance Max gives you about your customers and search trends.

The real power of Performance Max is that it is always learning about what resonates with your audience and gives you the data you need to make informed decisions about your campaign targets, budget, creative content, and CTAs.

It’s essential that you’re always looking for ways to optimize your Performance Max campaign based on what the tool is learning and telling you.

Google Performance Max Checklist

As you review your Performance Max campaign, make sure it includes these must-haves:

1. Minimum of 5 unique versions of text assets
2. Minimum of 5 unique versions of image assets
3. As much data as possible to optimize machine learning
4. Unique headlines and copy content
5. Frequent A/B testing
6. A minimum of 1 video (you may need more depending on what you learn about your audience)
7. Quality images that are engaging and adhere to Google’s quality standards
8. Aligned business objectives and campaigns
9. Create different campaigns for different goals
10. Strong call-to-action (CTA) that directs people to a real action
11. Use headlines and descriptions to highlight key information about your products, specials, and promotions
12. Use natural language that fits your product, campaign, and audience
13. Plan your campaign to allow for 1 – 2 weeks of ramp up time and then evaluate the campaign performance after 4 – 5 weeks
14. Set your ROAS (return on ad spend) target to the ROAS you want to meet. There is a fine balance with your ROAS – a higher ROAS goal means your campaign spends less and a lower ROAS goal means your campaign will likely spend more.

Remember just like SEO, your Performance Max campaigns take time to convert and drive the results you want.

Trust the data Google gives you. Like you, Google wants your ads to work.

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