Display campaigns serve visually engaging ads that help you reach more potential customers across the Display Network. If your Display campaigns are eligible, you can simplify your advertising experience and upgrade those Display campaigns to Performance Max campaigns. This can help you find more converting customers in more places and drive performance based on your specific conversion goals.
With Performance Max, you can access all Google Ads inventory from a single campaign and use Google AI technologies for bidding, budget optimization, audiences, creatives, attribution, and more. Learn more About Performance Max campaigns.
This article will discuss
- Benefits of upgrading a Display campaign to a Performance Max campaign
- Recommendations
- Transitioning from your Display to a Performance Max campaign
- Creative ad assets: Performance Max campaign upgrade
- Bidding: Performance Max campaign upgrade
- Targeting settings: Performance Max campaign upgrade
- How to upgrade a Display campaign to a Performance Max campaign
- Upgrade Display campaigns using Merchant Center feeds to Performance Max Retail
- FAQs
Benefits of upgrading a Display campaign to a Performance Max campaign
- More conversions: Advertisers who use Performance Max campaigns may achieve more conversions at a similar cost.
- Additional coverage across various Google ads platforms: Performance Max ads also run on Search, YouTube, Discover, Gmail, and Maps to help you drive more conversions.
- AI (artificial intelligence) technology for stronger performance: Google AI technology can provide improved performance across bidding, targeting, creative optimization, and more.
- Robust insights: Performance Max provides rich insights that show where your campaign is helping you find the new and valuable categories and terms. Learn more about Understanding Performance Max results with the Insights page
Recommendations
You can choose to create a Performance Max campaign at any time, but we recommend that your Display campaign have the following before you upgrade to make the transition easier:
- Use Google Ads conversion tracking or Google Analytics 4 conversion tracking
- Leverage Google AI, such as Smart Bidding and optimized targeting
- Have responsive display ads
To gain access to the guided upgrade flow, consider adding Google AI to your existing Display campaigns.
Transitioning from your Display campaign to a Performance Max campaign
Note: When you upgrade your Display campaign to a Performance Max campaign, the existing Display campaign is marked with the “Removed” status and your new Performance Max campaign is created. Learn more About campaign statuses.
If you think that you may want to run your Display campaign as it was before you upgraded it to a Performance Max campaign, simply copy the “Removed” Display campaign and create a new Display campaign. Should you wish to no longer use the new Performance Max campaign, you can pause or remove it. Learn how to Copy and paste campaigns, ad groups, ads, audiences and keywords.
When you upgrade your Display campaign to a Performance Max campaign, your existing assets, budget, and applicable settings will move from your existing Display campaign to your newly created Performance Max campaign. Your Display campaign will be marked with the “Removed” status, and your upgraded Performance Max campaign can begin to serve ads within the first day. Learn more About campaign statuses.
You can view performance data of your previous Display campaign by filtering your campaigns by status and finding your “Removed” Display campaign.
Any activity that results from your new Performance Max campaign will be recorded in the new Performance Max campaign’s performance metrics.
Performance Max campaigns can only support 100 asset groups. If you have more than 100 asset groups when you upgrade, your top performing responsive display ads are selected for migration. These asset groups are chosen based on their performance over the last 90 days prior to your upgrade.
Creative ad assets: Performance Max campaign upgrade
Display creatives that will transition to your Performance Max campaigns
If you have existing image ads and responsive display ads in your Display campaign that use the same final URL, they’ll be combined into asset groups when you upgrade to Performance Max. Asset groups will support a maximum of 15 images. Previews are available at the asset group level, but not for individual image ads.
Providing high quality text, images, and video can significantly improve performance of your new Performance Max campaign. The new campaign will also utilize advanced format features, including asset enhancement, auto-generated videos, and native formats based on the assets provided from your Display campaign.
- Supported (Learn about Display ad asset best practices)
- Images
- Videos
- Long headlines
- Short headlines
- Descriptions
- Logos (square and landscape)
- Business name
- Final URLs
- Ad extensions (visible only after you publish your new Performance Max campaign)
- Disclaimers (visible only after you publish your new Performance Max campaign)
- Calls to Action (Install, Visit Site, and See More calls to action are not supported in Performance Max campaigns. If you do have any of these selected in your previous Display campaign, the Google AI built into your new Performance Max campaign will replace those calls to action with the best fitting supported calls to action.)
- Not supported
- HTML
- GIFs
- Ad URL options
- HTML5 templates, Flash templates, and older image ad types that are no longer supported are also not supported in Performance Max campaigns, so they won’t be moved to your new campaign. Your other image ads won’t be affected, and you can replace removed assets at any time by adding more supported assets.
- Existing assets from your previous Display campaign will still be available. Once migrated, your campaign and its assets won’t be deleted, and only your campaign’s status will be changed.
- Ad URL options that were in any Display campaign that you’re upgrading won’t carry over from your Display campaign, but you can set these up again in your new Performance Max campaigns at the campaign level.
Bidding: Performance Max campaign upgrade
Your new Performance Max campaign will continue to use the eligible Smart Bidding strategy used in your previous Display campaign. It will also continue to combine that strategy with attribution technology that helps determine the best options for your campaign across all Google inventory, determining bids on auctions that have the highest probability of meeting your business goals in real-time.
If your previous Display campaign included a combination of different bidding targets at the campaign and ad-group levels, your new Performance Max campaign will use an average of those targets based on serving.
When you upgrade to your Performance Max campaign, your bid adjustments will be represented as a unified target for that campaign. You can change your bid adjustment from within your Performance Max campaign by adjusting your targeted bidding. Learn more about target CPA bidding and target ROAS bidding.
- Some Enhanced CPC Display campaigns are eligible to upgrade to Performance Max campaigns. During the migration, these campaigns will be updated to use Maximize Conversions with a target CPA. The average CPA the campaign has achieved recently will be used as the new target. You can edit this during the migration. Eligibility is based on the volume of recent conversions.
- Pay for Conversions Display campaigns are eligible to upgrade to Performance Max campaigns. During the migration, these campaigns will have their billing updated to be based on interactions instead of conversions. There is no eligibility requirement.
- Display campaigns previously using Enhanced CPC or Pay for Conversions bid strategies may go into a learning period when you switch to Performance Max as the bid strategy shifts to Maximize conversions with a Target CPA (cost-per-action).
- Campaigns with store visits as a marketing objective are now eligible. This goal uses view through conversions here which may cause changes in your performance. Learn more About store visit conversions.
Targeting settings: Performance Max campaign upgrade
Once you update to Performance Max, your campaign will use Google AI to show ads to the most relevant audiences who are most likely to convert. Your campaign will continue to use Google AI to optimize performance across all Google channels. Learn more About optimized targeting.
While not required, campaign targeting and exclusions from your previous Display campaign can change in your new Performance Max campaign in the following ways.
Audience hints
Any existing audience segments (for example, your data segments and Customer Match segments) and demographic targeting within Display campaigns that you upgrade to Performance Max campaigns will become audience hints. This automated targeting helps you uncover new converting customers across all of Google’s channels and networks. Learn more about Performance Max audience signals.
User lists
User lists will not be automatically carried over from your Display campaign as it is upgraded to Performance Max. If you wish to continue using your user lists, you should transition only those that include existing customers who have purchased your products or services to a New Customer Acquisition (NCA) goal within your new Performance Max campaign.
Note: Any lists you bring to NCA will be used across any campaign using NCA goals.
Performance Max offers new customer acquisition goals, so you can efficiently acquire new customers by bidding higher or bidding only to new customers. You can also set values for new customers to guide the AI. Choose between bidding higher (New Customer Value mode) or bidding only (New Customer Only mode) to acquire new customers based on your list. We recommend using New Customer Value mode when looking to acquire new customers.
Note: You should only select user lists that contain existing customers who have purchased your products or services (excluding those who have visited your website but did not convert). These will be added to all of your campaigns that use the new customer acquisition goal.
Updates to your user lists will be reflected in your Performance Max campaign after 3 days.
Brand safety settings at the account level
In addition, brand safety settings from your previous Display campaign will be available at the account-level so that you can tell Google Ads which types of content you don’t want your ads to appear in. This will benefit your new Performance Max campaign and all other existing campaigns.
- Content exclusions (Digital content label, sensitive content, and content types exclusions) will move to the account level.
- Keyword and placement exclusions will have an option to include at the account level during the upgrade, but this will not be selected by default.
- We recommend only keeping those related to brand safety, since including these will affect your entire Display and Video inventory across the different campaign types in your account. Learn more about How to use brand suitability features in Performance Max.
Note:
- If you’re upgrading Display campaigns that included in-video content exclusions, those exclusions will not carry over to your Performance Max campaigns. Learn how to Set content exclusions for Display campaigns.
- If your Display campaign includes more than 20,000 placement exclusions, you will not be able to move your placement exclusions from your Display campaign to your new Performance Max campaign. The maximum number of placement exclusions supported at the account level is 65,000.
Unsupported targeting
Performance Max automatically optimizes targeting to improve performance in the ever-changing advertising landscape. Because Performance Max campaigns may show ads to relevant audiences outside of the signals you provide, based on the Google AI that will help you meet your performance goals, certain more restrictive targeting is not supported in your new Performance Max campaign. These include:
- Positive targeting like keyword, topic, and placement targeting
- Device targeting for operating system, device models, network, or browser
- Exclusions for affinity and in-market segments, life events, and topics
- Geographic locations based on Areas of Interest, which are no longer available for any campaign type. Learn more About advanced location options.
You’ll spend less time on targeting, so you can have more time to focus on ad assets that really appeal to your audience.
How to upgrade a Display campaign to a Performance Max campaign
Note: When you upgrade your Display campaign to a Performance Max campaign, the existing Display campaign is marked with the “Removed” status and your new Performance Max campaign is created. Learn more About campaign statuses.
If you think that you may also want to run your Display campaign as it was before you upgraded it to a Performance Max campaign, make a copy of the existing Display campaign before upgrading it. Then you’ll be able to turn that copy of the campaign into a new Display campaign, while also easily upgrading the existing Display campaign into a Performance Max campaign. Learn how to Copy and paste campaigns, ad groups, ads, audiences and keywords.
There are 3 ways to do this:
- From the notifications in your Google Ads account
- From the “Recommendations” page
- From the inline recommendations shown on your campaign page
Upgrade from the notifications in your Google Ads account
- In your Google Ads account, go to the top-right corner and click the notifications icon
.
- Select the “Upgrade your Display campaigns” notification and click Apply.
- When you get a confirmation, click Apply all to confirm.
Upgrade from the “Recommendations” page
- In your Google Ads account, go to the Recommendationspage.
- Click View Recommendations and select the checkbox
alongside every campaign you want to update.
- Select Apply all in the “Upgrade to Performance Max” recommendation to upgrade all campaigns in one click.
- In the confirmation modal, click Apply all.
Upgrade from your campaigns page
- In your campaigns page, you might find a notification recommending you to upgrade to Performance Max on the right side of the page.
- Click View to review the conversion benefits the upgrade will give you.
- Click Apply all to upgrade your Display campaign to a Performance Max campaign.
Upgrade Display campaigns using Merchant Center feeds to Performance Max Retail
You can now easily upgrade your Display retail campaigns that use Merchant Center feeds to Performance Max Retail to help maximize your reach and meet new customers. With Performance Max Retail campaigns, you’ll have access to new inventory, ad formats, and audiences across all Google channels including YouTube, Search, and Discover. To further help your smooth transition to Performance Max Retail, your campaign settings and most filters will be automatically mapped to optimal settings to mirror your current Display campaign.
Below are the 3 main areas that help make Performance Max Retail campaigns unique:
Product filters
In Display campaigns, advertisers filter Merchant Center product feeds to create ad groups with specific offers. For example, a tag like “Men’s Clothes” might be used to create an ad group with just men’s clothes products, headlines, descriptions, and others. In Performance Max, these are listing groups.
In order to continue organizing your listings by specific attributes you can switch to custom label attributes.
If you’re using older features that are unsupported in Performance Max, you’ll need to either create new listing group criteria using other existing features, or update your Merchant Center feed to use a newer solution.
Eligible offers
Display campaigns are currently powered by the “Display Use Case,” and need to transition to the “Shopping Use Case” in Merchant Center. This will mostly have no impact on your products and listings, but it does impact in these two cases:
- Offers that exclude the shopping use case: These advertisers need to update their feeds to enable the shopping use case (in the feed) before migrating campaigns.
- Policy differences: There are small policy enforcement differences between Shopping and Display campaigns on which offers are eligible. Most campaigns have only a minor impact on these offers, and your budget can flow to other items, plus some offers might become newly eligible in Display as well, offsetting any gaps.
HTML5 creative transfer
HTML5 ads being used in your current Display campaigns can also be used in Performance Max Retail campaigns as long as they're built in a responsive format. While HTML5 ads may have an impact on your campaign’s overall performance, you can still use HTML5 ads as a backup option if needed. It’s recommended that HTML5 ads are created in Google Web Designer (GWD) to ensure the ads serve properly. Note that HTML5 ads are not supported by traditional Performance Max campaigns.
FAQs
Even if you already have a similar Performance Max campaign, we recommend upgrading from Display to a new Performance Max campaign. This is because:
- If you have the option to run an experiment, we recommend A/B testing to understand the uplift in conversions/conversion value you would get from upgrading.
- Manual upgrade (simply moving budgets from one campaign to another), is an error-prone process if campaign settings and configurations aren’t carried over consistently and correctly. This could cause performance changes that are difficult to diagnose
- Having multiple Performance Max campaigns is acceptable, especially if they have different settings, conversion goals, bid targets, or other differing configurations. If you’d still like to consolidate your campaigns to simplify management and maximize results from a unified, agile budget, proceed with caution and ensure that your campaign settings are configured correctly to maintain consistent performance. There might be some movement in reporting between campaigns. However, performance at the account level should not be negatively affected.
- From the notifications in your Google Ads account
- From the “Recommendations” page
- From the notifications in your “Campaign” page
Wider availability is expected later in 2023.
No. If you’re using Performance Max campaigns, excluding or targeting specific inventory isn’t possible. Performance Max focuses on your goals to help you drive more conversions or conversion value across Google's full range of advertising channels and inventory.
It’s important to add accurate goals and conversion data to help steer performance and ensure that your campaign’s optimized for the right things. Even if one channel or specific inventory placement may outperform another across auctions, that may not be the case in a specific auction.
Performance Max campaigns allow all account-level placement exclusions. Campaign-level placement exclusions aren’t available yet.
Your ads can be excluded from being placed in specific pages, sites, mobile apps, and videos where you don't want them to be shown. However, this placement exclusion feature can negatively impact your campaign’s performance as it limits serving. Placement exclusion is recommended only for brand safety, like excluding websites and mobile apps that aren’t appropriate for your brand. Learn how to Exclude placements at the account level.