Create a Performance Max campaign with online sales or lead generation goals
Step 3: Set your campaign settings
- On the “Campaign settings” page, select the locations to target under “Locations”.
- To target a location that isn’t listed, select Enter another location, enter the name of the place you want to target, then select Include or Exclude.
- If you want to target specific places within a location, select Nearby and again select Include or Exclude locations.
- Note: For more location targeting options, use “Advanced search”. You can add location in bulk or enter a location and radius around that specific location that you'd like to target.
- Under the “Languages” dropdown, select the languages your customers speak. You can select multiple languages to show your ads to specific sets of customers.
- Finalize any additional settings you’d like to set up under “More settings”. Select Next.
Turn on text customization
If you keep text customization selected, Performance Max campaigns may auto-generate assets if Google AI predicts that your campaign performance can be improved. Google AI curates text and images from your landing pages and shows them in your ads when it’s predicted to improve performance. Then, you can add information like brand colors to help your campaign look more personalized.
If both the text customization settings (text assets and Final URL) in Google Ads are checked and turned on for your campaign, your final URL may be replaced with a more relevant domain based on customer intent, that uses a dynamic headline, description, and creative assets from your landing page’s content. By turning this feature on, you can increase your campaign’s ability to serve.
Brand guidelines
With brand guidelines, you can control how your brand is represented in your automated assets or Performance Max campaign formats. You’ll be able to easily upload the following customizations in the same place once per campaign:
- Brand font
- Brand color
- Business name
- Business logo assets (1-5 images)
More settings
You can set up ad scheduling, campaign start and end dates, and URL settings under “More settings”.
Ad scheduling
Use ad scheduling to determine the number of days and hours your ad will show. For some goals, you may want your ad to only show during business hours or when you are available to handle customer inquiries.
- Learn more About ad scheduling.
- Learn how to Create an ad schedule.
Exclude brand traffic
You can prevent your Performance Max campaign ads from serving for specific brand searches (including misspellings) by creating a Brand list in your account and applying it to your Performance Max campaign.
Learn more About brand settings for Search and Performance Max.
Demographic exclusions
Performance Max campaigns offer demographic exclusions to refine your target audience and help you meet regulatory requirements. This feature allows you to prevent your ads from being shown to specific demographic groups to make your advertising more efficient, or to prevent ads from showing for restricted groups for sensitive industries. Businesses with products or services tailored to specific demographics can also leverage this feature to focus their ad delivery on their ideal customer base.
To use demographic exclusions, go to your campaign settings (or during campaign creation) to the "More/Other settings" section and select the “Demographic exclusions” option to turn on age or gender exclusions.
Age exclusions
Selecting an age range will exclude users in that age range from being served ads for your Performance Max campaign. If this is a regulatory requirement to only serve to certain age groups, ensure you exclude users of “Unknown” age ranges.
Gender exclusions
Selecting a gender option will exclude users of that gender from being served ads for your Performance Max campaign. If this is a strict or regulatory requirement, ensure you exclude users of “Unknown” gender.
Data exclusions
The "Your Data Exclusions" feature provides you with significantly greater control over audience targeting within Performance Max campaigns. This capability is designed for scenarios where fully excluding specific remarketing lists is crucial for your business objectives, allowing you to exclude advertiser-provided audience remarketing lists from being targeted by Performance Max.
Supported remarketing list types:
- Customer Match
- Web visitor lists
- Google Analytics lists
If you specifically want to acquire new customers (exclude existing customers), we recommend using the new customer acquisition goal feature instead as this allows additional reporting and value specification options.
Campaign URL options
The tracking template is where you put tracking information. Performance Max only supports the account-level or campaign-level tracking template. Any tracking template at the lower level, such as ad group or product group, will be automatically removed.
You can use URL parameters within the template to customize your final URL. When an ad is clicked, the information is used to create your landing page URL.
Page feeds
Page feeds allow you to provide a set of URLs that will be used to serve ads for your Performance Max campaign, including to generate dynamic content like headlines or descriptions when it’s predicted to better match user intent.
Learn more about How to use page feeds in Performance Max.
Devices in Performance Max campaigns
Performance Max campaigns provide enhanced control over device targeting, allowing advertisers to refine their reach and optimize campaign performance based on device type. You can target specific devices, including computers, mobile phones, tablets, and TV screens.
This enhanced control allows for greater precision in reaching the desired audience and aligning ad creatives with user context. By focusing on the most relevant devices and operating systems, you can see improvements in key metrics such as click-through rates and conversion rates.