Get started with Performance Max

This guide provides a checklist of concepts and tasks for each of the three Performance Max business goals to help you build your campaign. To get started, select a business goal:

Online sales or lead generation Online sales with a product feed Travel Goals

Performance Max for online sales with a product feed (retail)

Performance Max allows advertisers to access all Google Ads channels and inventory from a single, unified campaign. The steps to create a Performance Max campaign for retail are as follows. Click the links in each section for more information.

Important: In order to use Performance Max campaigns, you must have conversion tracking set up on your Google Ads account.

Performance Max concepts

Learn about Performance Max for online sales with a product feed (retail)

Performance Max for retail helps you expand your reach and goals by offering the opportunity to serve on additional inventory.

Important: In order to use Performance Max for retail, the Google Ads account must be linked to an existing Merchant Center account. By linking to Merchant Center, assets can be generated automatically for the campaign, but reach and performance will be limited.

When creating a Performance Max campaign, you can use a bulk mutate request to create the resources required to form a valid, serving campaign in a single request. Not all resources must be created in a single bulk mutate request. The following resources are required to create a valid, serving Performance Max campaign. Learn more in the Structure requests guide.

• CampaignBudget
• Campaign
• AssetGroups
• AssetGroupAssets (if applicable)
• AssetGroupListingGroupFilters

---

Campaign and campaign budget

Add a campaign budget

• The budget must have a DAILY budget period.
• The budget cannot be shared.

---

Add a campaign and bidding strategy

Performance Max campaigns have an AdvertisingChannelType of PERFORMANCE_MAX. No AdvertisingChannelSubType should be set.

These are the only supported bidding strategies:

• If you aren't tracking values and care about all of your conversions equally, use the MaximizeConversions bidding strategy. An optional target CPA (cost-per-action) can be set. Learn more.

• If you're tracking values with your conversions, set the MaximizeConversionValue bidding strategy. An optional target ROAS (return on ad spend) can be set. Learn more.

Important: In order to upgrade a Performance Max campaign to a retail campaign, you must set the ShoppingSetting fields of the campaign. Learn more.

---

Add custom conversion goals (optional)

If conversion goals are not explicitly set for the campaign, it defaults to using customer-level conversion goals. However, you can override customer conversion goals to set campaign-specific conversion goals.

---

Add campaign targeting (optional)

Performance Max campaigns support the following types of criteria:

• AD_SCHEDULE
• LANGUAGE
• LOCATION
• LOCATION_GROUP
• WEBPAGE

---

Assets, asset groups, and product targeting

Add account level assets (optional)

Assets are not required for Performance Max for retail campaigns since Google automatically creates assets from the product listings included in the associated Merchant Center account. However, we recommend adding assets for better campaign performance.

Note: Because assets are created at the customer level, you could choose to add assets prior to creating your campaign. However, you could also include asset creation in the bulk mutate request that creates your Performance Max for retail campaign.

---

Add asset groups

An asset group is a collection of assets centered on a theme or related to a target audience. The asset group is used to assemble all of your ads and build an inventory for all applicable ad formats for your advertising objective. Learn more about asset groups.

Asset groups contain one or more final URLs. At least one final URL is required. Use the URL that is most relevant to the conversion path for the given asset group and campaign objectives.

A common approach for creating asset groups in Performance Max for retail campaigns is to organize asset groups by product or product group (more detail below).

---

Link assets to asset groups (optional)

An AssetGroup is linked to an Asset by creating a new AssetGroupAsset and providing the following:

• Resource name of the AssetGroup
• Resource name of the Asset
• AssetFieldType of the Asset in the AssetGroup

Note: This step is only required if you intend to add assets to your asset groups, which is optional for Performance Max for retail campaigns.

---

Set up asset group product targeting

In Performance Max for retail campaigns, an AssetGroupListingGroupFilter lets you partition your products into groups, which are referred to as product groups in the web interface. You can group using multiple dimensions to form a product partition tree, which lets you include or exclude products from a given asset group.

Note: When using Performance Max for retail campaigns, each asset group must have a valid product partition tree composed of one or more AssetGroupListingGroupFilter resources associated with it. To target all products, use a single node tree.

---

Add asset group signals (optional)

An AssetGroupSignal is a signal that you can provide to Google to optimize ad serving at the asset group level. There are two types of hints that you can provide to Google:

• audience: A reusable collection of focused segments, demographic targeting, and exclusions
• search_theme: Information about what your customers are searching for and which topics lead to conversions for your business that you can provide to Google AI

---

Specify ValueTrack parameters (optional)

Only some ValueTrack parameters are supported for Performance Max campaigns.

---

Optimization with recommendations

Optimize campaign performance with recommendations

Performance Max recommendations categories:

• Bidding

• Asset group strength

• Asset group signals

---