What is Performance Max (PMax)?
Performance Max is a conversion-based campaign type that allows advertisers to access all of Google’s channels like YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail, and Maps through a single campaign.
Performance Max helps you drive performance based on your specified conversion goals for your rental property, delivering more conversions and value by optimizing performance in real-time and across channels using Smart Bidding. Performance Max uses Google AI across bidding, budget optimization, audiences, creatives, attribution, and more.
Naturally, Performance Max strikes our curiosity.
Here are several ways to implement Performance Max (PMax) in your multifamily marketing strategy, key findings, and baseline KPIs to drive conversions.
We analyzed 27 multifamily properties with a consistent Performance Max campaign for 6 months, from August 2023 through January 2024, located in the Southeast and Midwest regions.
The data pull provides preliminary benchmark data for evaluation. The information below gauges whether your PMax campaign is performing at par, underperforming, or outperforming certain metrics.
4 Case Study Highlights with Performance Max Campaigns
- Increased Efficiency: Cost-per-click and Cost-Per-Acquisition metrics demonstrated high efficiency consistently across Performance Max campaigns.
- Broadens Reach: Performance Max serves across the Google Network and display across Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, and Discovery, which broadens reach but may cause fluctuations in impressions.
- Budget Suggestions: Direct correlation with cost and overall performance, suggesting that higher budgets lead to better results in both engagement and conversion metrics.
Performance Max Best Practices
Before we dive into the data, let’s start with best practices for Performance Max (PMax).
Maximize Assets
- Utilizing all headlines, descriptions, image spots, and video spots. This gives Google the highest amount of variations to showcase your property and unique features.
Campaign Duration
- We recommend running the Performance Max campaign for a minimum of 6 months, which allows ample time for the campaign to be optimized and to analyze how seasonality may impact performance.
Audience Insights
- Explore Audience Insights to increase relevancy in targeting. Custom intent audiences are audiences searching for relevant terms related to your rental housing property.
Quality Creative
- Quality creative is crucial for your property campaigns and we recommend having a variety of photo and video options.
Performance Max Results
We first examined each month and campaign to find a baseline for average performance.
- We experimented if certain months performed better than others with a MoM analysis.
- Our analysis suggests, that PMax campaigns see a 5-7% click-through rate Month Over Month (MoM) and Click-Through-Rate (CTR) will likely be lower than standard search campaigns due to an increase in impression volume. From analyzing the MoM data, this indicates that there are benefits to running Pmax year-round without concerns about seasonality.
- The Regression Analysis examines the relationship between various KPIs to determine how increasing spend impacts performance. We discovered a positive correlation between cost and overall performance, suggesting that higher budgets lead to better results in both engagement and conversion metrics.
- Volume-based metrics, such as conversion volume, impression volume, and interaction volume, vary based on budget and are not included for benchmarking analysis.
- We also analyzed High Spending Accounts vs Low Spending accounts, as defined below, to better distinguish and predict how a Pmax campaign may perform (see below).
Performance Max Key Takeaways
Efficiency Improvements for Campaigns
Overall, we noted that Cost-Per-Click and Cost-Per-Acquisition metrics demonstrated high efficiency across most Performance Max campaigns. In comparison, these metrics consistently remained well below our benchmarks for Search campaigns. These lower averages also contribute to the improvement of total account metrics.
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Monitoring Search campaign KPIs individually is still important since PMax runs alongside Search as a different campaign type.
Impression Volume and Click-Through-Rate
Performance Max serves across the Google Network, broadening our reach significantly. Ads within PMax display across Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, and Discovery. As a result, you may notice your overall account CTR decrease due to large fluctuations in impressions. This is expected with integrating PMax into an account.
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If you have questions or concerns about inflated impressions, ask one of our motley crew members.
YouTube Performance Max Placements
While analyzing performance, we also considered what causes dips in performance. While it’s encouraged to utilize quality video assets, however, when these assets are unavailable, Google Ads generates video assets automatically with ‘automatically created assets’.
- While headline and description auto-assets could be removed, video assets created by Google could not be removed from the property campaign once created as of April 2024.
Implementing Performance Max for Property Management
Performance Max is one of Google’s newest initiatives that continues evolving with new features. Originally tailored to e-commerce campaigns, it is still relatively new to lead-generation advertisers. PMax aims to drive conversion growth, lead generation success, and overall optimal results. In alignment with this objective, Google continuously introduces new beta features to assist advertisers in achieving their unique goals.
Our team knows how to implement Performance Max for your marketing campaigns and reach your property’s full potential, enhance performance and results, and attract residents to your property.
