Google adds six new features for Performance Max campaigns.

The new features will help advertisers to understand and diagnose issues and improve the Performance of their Google Ads campaigns.

Google Performance Max campaign users will shortly notice these six new features in their accounts:

Seasonality adjustments

This will let advertisers adjust the bid strategy based on anticipated changes in conversion rates for seasonal events such as holiday sales.

It is worth noting that Smart Bidding already exists for predicted seasonal events, and advertisers should only use the adjustments for otherwise atypical differences.

We advise that this adjustment feature be used for long weekend promotions or sales that generally last between 1-7 days.

Data exclusions

This feature will tell Smart Bidding to ignore data from dates where you may have experienced issues with conversion tracking, which may have affected the accuracy of your data.

An example of this would be website outages, bugs or tagging issues.

Explanations

Explanations will make it more straightforward for advertisers to identify performance fluctuations, diagnose issues, and provide recommendations to help enhance Performance.

If you have a product feed, the explanations will analyse the product status and top moving products, groups and types.

Optimisation Score

This new feature will enable advertisers to see where the campaign has room for improvement and reveals recommendations to help you take action to drive better results.

Advanced Location Targeting

With a Google Merchant Centre feed, you’ll now see advanced location options for targeting and exclusions for your Performance Max campaigns.

Under the location options, advertisers can now target users based on physical “Presence” or “Presence or interest”.

Google has added this feature to give advertisers more transparency and control over poor-quality clicks or leads by excluding specific locations from their targeting.

Diagnostic Insights

Google has launched diagnostic insights to help advertisers ensure their Performance Max campaigns are set up correctly.

When a new Performance Max campaign is launched, the diagnostic insights feature will automatically identify issues that relate to:

• Status
• Billing
• Policies
• Conversion tracking
• Budget
• Strategy targets
• Ad strength

The new insights feature could be handy to ensure advertisers don’t violate ad policies and will also give helpful visibility into ad strength.

But, advertisers must be aware that these are insights, and not all suggestions are required fixes.

In addition, insights into budget and strategy are left up to the advertiser and should be manually reviewed and carefully considered before implementation.

Why are these new features important?

Google is continually updating their systems to provide advertisers more transparency and control over their Performance Max campaigns.

While many advertisers agree that this is a step in the right direction, they should also be aware that the explanations and optimisation score recommendations are guidelines, not required fixes.

Always test your campaigns and monitor them regularly. Then, make campaign adjustments based on data and your unique business.

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