Optimization tips for Performance Max for lead generation

Performance Max uses Google AI to help you drive growth in conversions and value through bidding, targeting, creatives, and attribution. It's designed to perform across a wide range of marketing objectives and media channels. Because of this, we recommend using the following tips to help set up your Performance Max campaigns for lead generation and for success and optimal results.

This article explains the best practices that you can implement in your Performance Max campaigns for lead generation.

For additional best practices, review:

• Best practices for all business types
• Best practices for online sales (non-shopping)
• Best practices for store goals
• Best practices for retail advertisers with online sales goals using a Merchant Center feed

Campaign set up and planning

• Create Performance Max campaigns to reach your customers wherever they are in their purchase journey, across Search, Display, Discover, YouTube, and more. It is Google’s first cross-channel lead generation campaign, optimizing your budget across Google properties to find you more high quality leads.
• Campaign duration: Run campaigns for at least 6 weeks to allow Google AI time to ramp up and curate sufficient data to compare performance.
• Conversion goal selection: Use lead generation conversion goals such as “Contacts”, “Submit lead forms”, “Book appointment”, “Sign-up”, “Request quote”, “Imported leads”, “Qualified leads”, or “Converted leads” to enhance your protection against invalid activity. Your conversion goals are one of the signals we use to strengthen our prevention systems.
• Focus on a single event in your lead-to-sale journey that you want to bid towards. The lowest funnel conversion, such as the final sale value, is ideal for this as it reflects the true economic value to your business. Consider the following factors when determining which action you want to optimize towards:
  • Accuracy: Closely aligns with your business objectives and desired outcomes
  • Conversion delay: The action you want to optimize for occurs within a manageable conversion delay
  • Upload frequency: Can upload data regularly, ideally daily
  • Volume: Generate at least 15 conversions per month
• Upload conversion values using measurement solutions like the gTag or enhanced conversions for leads. Assign 2 or more values, preferably dynamic. For example, you may want to create static values for high, medium, and low quality leads, based on qualifying attributes captured in the lead form submission or elsewhere. Or in other instances, you may want to import dynamic values, representing a prospect’s likelihood to convert, or the actual final sale value.
  When you assign meaningful values, it’ll give you a deeper understanding of the true business impact that your marketing efforts are delivering. The better data you provide, the more effectively Google AI-powered solutions can deliver against your goals.

Bidding and automation

• Smart Bidding: Use Smart Bidding to maximize your conversions and business value and make accurate predictions for every auction.
• Value-based bidding: If you’re tracking lead values, use value-based bidding strategies to correctly value offline and online conversions and to maximize lead value. It combines your conversion data with Google’s real-time understanding of user intent to optimize bids to reach the right customer with your ads.
  • Maximize conversion value maximizes the total conversion value within your budget.
  • Maximize conversion value with target ROAS drives the highest conversion value while maintaining a target return on ad spend (tROAS). We recommend using this bid strategy when you have at least 15 conversions in the last 30 days.
  • If you don’t have a specific ROAS target, use the Maximize conversion value bidding strategy to maximize total conversion value within your specified budget.
  • If you have a specific ROAS target: Use the Max Conversion Value bid strategy with a ROAS target to maximize the total conversion value within your efficiency target.
    • If you are unable to report values and would prefer to focus on driving conversion volume only, leverage Maximize conversions bidding with an optional target CPA.

• Conversion based bidding: If you value leads equally, use conversion-based Smart Bidding to maximize lead volume.
  • Maximize conversions drives as many conversions as possible within your specified budget.
  • Maximize conversions with target obtains as many conversions as possible while maintaining a target CPA.
• Setting targets: If you’re using the Maximize Conversions or Target CPA (tCPA) bidding strategies, select the conversion action that’s furthest down the funnel and has a sufficient frequency, such as qualified or converted leads. Then, set the tCPA to a value that’s close to or equal to the highest amount you’re willing to pay for a lead of this type. Mark the conversion you create for your main goal as “Primary” and other lead conversions (goals) as “Observation only”.
• Conversion value rules: Conversion value rules help you to better express the value of conversions as they relate to your business. They also allow you to adjust values for conversion events based on conditions like geographic location, device, and audiences at auction time bidding in real time.
• Enhanced conversions for leads: We recommend using enhanced conversions for leads (ECL). ECL helps improve lead quality by importing accurate conversion data from offline events into your account, which can then be used to optimize your campaigns through automation. Learn more About enhanced conversion for leads and our other offline conversion import solutions.

Creative

• Creative refresh: Creative is your most powerful tool to help drive performance and allows you to customize the campaign to promote new products or new offers. For the best results, focus on providing unique content and refresh often.
• Assets to audience signals: Add another asset group if you want to tailor ads for a different audience. You may notice audience signals don't limit targeting and the asset group serves beyond the audience. For best results, make sure to provide unique content that engages your audiences and tie assets to the right audience signals.
• Add more assets: To continue attracting new users, we recommend that you add new assets or update your existing ones as your marketing message evolves. More assets mean more potential ad formats that you can create for different channels and users.

Lead form

Lead form assets help you generate leads by allowing people to submit their information in a form directly in your ad.

• Make the most out of your lead form assets by being as informative as possible. Write clear descriptions to communicate the value you’re offering in your ad text.
• Information: Only ask for strictly necessary information. Additional questions decrease the completion rate and, therefore, increase CPA.
• CTA: The call-to-action (CTA) should either direct people to the website to fill out the form or have people fill out the form directly from the ad format (YouTube, Search Extension).
• Questions: Use qualifying questions and friction (such as reCAPTCHA) within lead forms. If you’re using the Google lead form, select qualifying questions to help further qualify your lead before they submit the form.
• Call assets: Add phone numbers to your ads to increase clickthrough rates by using call assets.
• Add both lead form assets and call assets to drive leads at scale by enabling customers to reach out to you in their preferred way. Users can submit their information directly within your ad or call you as they search, discover, or watch content.

Reporting

• Ad strength: Ad strength can be found by clicking Ads in the “Campaign” dropdown from the left-side page menu, then reviewing the “Ad strength” column. The metric ranges from “Poor” to “Excellent”. Use the “Ad Strength” indicator to determine if an asset group is set up for success.

Audience signals

• Audience signal: Performance Max is powered by Google AI. Use relevant audience lists as signals to speed up the time it takes Google AI to ramp up and enhance your campaign’s results. Use remarketing lists, custom intent, Customer Match, and similar segments as signals.
• Existing leads: Use existing leads and ramp up automation faster with Customer Match and first-party audience data. These lists give Google AI a strong signal on who your existing customers are and how to reach them along with similar customers. You can also use Customer Match lists to automatically build similar audiences and find customers similar to your existing ones.

Related links

• About Performance Max campaigns
• Create a Performance Max campaign
• Performance Max campaign setup issues
• Create a Performance Max campaign with products from Merchant Center
• Best practices for generating high-quality leads