At ADM, we’ve become huge fans of Google’s Performance Max campaigns as a performance marketing tool. By combining powerful AI optimizations with multi-format delivery, they’ve been a sea change in SEM, helping many of our clients unlock sales and revenue increases that may not have been attainable through traditional campaign types.
But when discussing this campaign type, a lot of attention often goes to its shopping capacity. Because Performance Max is excellent at placing product listing ads (PLAs), and because its launch coincided with Google sunsetting its previous Smart Shopping campaign type, many might be inclined to consider it simply a more advanced eCommerce campaign.
Just because Performance Max shines in this capacity, however, doesn’t mean its effectiveness is limited to selling physical products. In fact, these campaigns can be highly effective even without a shopping feed attached to them. In this blog, we’ll lay out how our team leveraged Performance Max to deliver sustained results for an online services and a digital health services brand.
Delivering New Revenue for an Online Services Client
Starting in late 2022, ADM began testing Performance Max campaigns for a large online services client that works across multiple business verticals. ADM continually looks to grow our clients’ revenue using every available lever at our disposal, and the client had a strong desire to scale the account, while driving even more revenue and leads. We wanted to see how Performance Max would be able to drive both individual sales and large business orders.
After testing across a number of verticals with different combinations of landing pages and ad creative (copy, imagery, headlines), Performance Max emerged as an extremely potent tactic for delivering large business orders—not what you’d expect for a campaign many advertisers think of as an eCommerce/Shopping tool!
Having proved its success in this application, Performance Max has become a staple revenue and profit driver in the account. Since the beginning of 2023, the campaign has contributed significant amounts of new profit—and also had a positive impact on other campaigns as well.
Performance Max’s algorithms sometimes pick up brand-related queries that standard brand campaigns do not, and it also supports in brand awareness through its video and display placements. Because of this, we’ve observed a sustained uptick in consistency from our standard Branded Search campaigns that coincided with the launch and expansion of Performance Max in the account.
Expanding Concept Coverage for a Health Client
In another case, we tested Performance Max’s utility for a telehealth client and were highly impressed by the results. Like the services client, this company did not offer a physical product for sale, so it did not advertise using a shopping feed. Instead, we theorized that the inclusion of a Performance Max campaign could be useful for expanding keyword coverage without dramatically increasing costs.
In their field of healthcare, some conditions are extremely competitive—to the point that some keywords produced customer acquisition costs (CAC) in excess of $1,000. Those fields of medicine are important to this client’s business, but the intense competition and costs would have made for an extremely inefficient play in our Non-Brand Search efforts. We began testing a generally-aimed Performance Max campaign in the account, with the belief that Google’s algorithms could best identify high-intent users and reach them across the right channels to result in a conversion.
Satisfied with our test of the generalist Performance Max campaign, we began adding asset groups that would tackle these particularly competitive concepts. In doing so, we found that Performance Max was able to facilitate new patient signups with remarkable efficiency and consistency.
It generated a noticeable uptick in incremental conversions while maintaining a CAC similar to other non-brand search campaigns in the account, which was far lower than if we had continued pursuing these care concepts in their own standalone non-brand search campaigns. In this case, Performance Max showed the ability to increase coverage of competitive areas of the client’s business and grow conversions there while maintaining cost efficiency that could not have been achieved otherwise.
Analysis
While Performance Max is obviously a first-choice campaign type for eCommerce brands, ADM’s testing and implementation have shown that it can provide surprising utility outside of this deployment. By reaching potential customers across the breadth of Google’s online properties and using strong AI-driven inferences to learn who is most likely to convert, this campaign type has shown itself to be far from a one-trick pony.
That said, it’s still key to always launch these outside-of-the-box applications as tests, knowing that multiple creative iterations and adjustments may be necessary to find success. In both cases, the focus was on narrowing in on specific segments of the client’s business where Performance Max would deliver the best results with the most efficiency—rather than using it as a catch-all replacement for existing tactics, it became a valuable tool for scaling and adding incremental conversions and revenue. If you’re looking for an expert performance marketing agency that dedicates itself to always finding new ways to help its clients grow, don’t hesitate to reach out to the ADM team below to start a conversation.
