Google has introduced Performance Max for Store Goals, a powerful new way to optimise your Google Ads campaigns across all Google inventory using advanced machine learning.
Designed to drive higher performance and deliver more relevant traffic to your physical locations, this new feature helps you reach customers most likely to visit your store, improving both online and in-store conversions.
What is Performance Max for Store Goals?
Performance Max for Store Goals is a powerful Google Ads solution designed to help businesses drive foot traffic and sales to their physical locations. By using Google’s machine learning, this feature allows you to reach consumers across all Google platforms who are most likely to visit your store or business.
It works to optimise your ads and targeting strategies in a way that drives measurable returns on your locations, enhancing both online and offline customer engagement.
Key Features of Performance Max for Store Goals
Here are the top features of Performance Max for Store Goals:
Goals-Based Campaigns for Targeted Success
Performance Max for Store Goals allows you to clearly define your marketing objectives and use them as the primary focus of your campaigns. Whether you’re aiming for increased foot traffic, higher in-store sales, or greater brand visibility, Performance Max uses Google’s machine learning technology to dynamically find and target customers across all Google properties (including Search, YouTube, Display, Maps, and more).
Enhanced Machine Learning for Optimal Results
With Performance Max, you gain access to the most advanced machine learning and attribution technology from Google Ads. The system intelligently optimises your bids, creative assets, and targeting, so that your ads are shown at the right time, to the right people, on the right platform.
Seamless Integration of Local Campaigns
To enhance the return on your physical store locations, Performance Max incorporates the existing Local Campaigns infrastructure in a new Google Ads UI experience. This integration combines the tried-and-tested local advertising features by combining them with PMax’s broader reach, driving foot traffic and online-to-offline conversions.
The Power of Digital for Offline Decisions
Consumers are increasingly turning to the internet to inform their offline decisions. Whether it’s finding the nearest store or checking the availability of a product, Google Search and Maps have become tools to guide consumers toward businesses in their area.
As more people rely on digital to make purchase decisions, Performance Max for Store Goals ensures your business stays visible to those who are ready to make a purchase.
Key insights into consumer behaviour:
- Searches for “now near me” have grown globally by over 100% YoY
- Searches for “in stock” have grown globally by over 800% YoY
- Searches on Google Maps for “curbside pickup” have increased globally by 5,000% YoY
- Searches for “delivery restaurants near me” have grown globally by over 1,000% YoY
- Searches for “takeout restaurants” have grown globally by over 2,000% YoY
The Goal of Performance Max for Store Goals
With Performance Max for Store Goals, you can increase the returns on your real-world assets. Here are the top advantages it can bring your business:
- Right person: Optimises to reach consumers who are most likely to visit your business.
- Right time: Triggered by user intent, distance to your business, local search queries, and device.
- Right message: Lightweight implementation using standard assets that Google optimises for store goals only (store visits, contacts, and/or directions to store).
- Right platform: Performance Max for store goals runs on Google platforms that provide incremental reach to existing campaigns.
Advertisers can optimise their campaigns based on a combination of store visits, contacts, and direction clicks.
Here are the range of signals used to reach the right audience:
- Actual query
- Location
- Distance to Location
- New visitors
- Ad creative
- Likely to visit
- Channel & Device
What are Audience Signals?
Audience Signals are a new innovative and more efficient way to reach your most valuable audiences.
As advertisers build Performance Max campaigns, Audience Signals allow them to influence automation by directly indicating the audiences that are most relevant to their business and that have the highest likelihood of conversion.
Audience Signals is built to help advertisers speed up the campaign learning period while also steering automation with the best of Google's automated targeting technology.
Key Strategies Supported by the Store Goals Objective in Performance Max
Maximise Traffic Across All Locations
- Goal: Drive more foot traffic to your stores, as offline customers are often more valuable.
- Scenario: If you’re gearing up for an annual sale and want to attract as many customers as possible, or if you’re looking for ways to boost both online visits and sales.
- Benefit: Achieve up to 3.4x incremental offline ROAS by reaching a broader audience and maximise visits to all of your store locations.
Support Specific Locations
- Goal: Focus on driving targeted traffic to specific stores.
- Scenario: You need to increase traffic to your top-performing locations, boost sales at struggling stores, or ensure awareness around new store openings.
- Benefit: Tailor your campaigns to focus on areas that need the most attention, across your most important and underperforming locations.
With Performance Max for Store Goals, you can implement these strategies to boost local traffic, drive sales, and ensure your stores get the attention they deserve.
Step-By-Step Guide To Implement Your First Performance Max for Store Goals Campaign
Getting started with Performance Max for Store Goals is simple. Follow these clear steps to create a campaign that drives meaningful foot traffic to your locations.
Step 1: Choose Performance Max Campaigns
Begin by selecting Performance Max as your campaign type in Google Ads.
Performance Max enables you to reach customers across all Google platforms, including Search, YouTube, Maps, and more while optimising for the specific store goals that matter most to your business.
Step 2: Select Your Store Goals
Define your store goals based on what you aim to achieve with your campaign.
Whether it’s driving foot traffic, increasing in-store purchases, or generating awareness for new locations, select the specific objectives that align with your business needs. You can also choose to maximise traffic across all locations or focus on specific stores.
Step 3: Apply Your Business Locations
Next, add your business locations to the campaign. This step ensures that your ads will target consumers who are geographically close to your stores.
Step 4: Name Your Performance Max Campaign
Give your campaign a clear, descriptive name to keep things organised and easily identifiable. This will help you track the performance of each campaign as you scale or adjust based on results.
Step 5: Set Budgets and Bid Strategy
Set your campaign budget based on your goals and available resources. You’ll also need to choose your bid strategy—whether it’s focused on maximising store visits, driving sales, or a combination of both. You can choose a target ROAS or let the system automatically optimise for your goals.
Step 6: Apply Campaign Settings
Configure your campaign settings, including geographic targeting, ad scheduling, and language preferences. Fine-tuning these settings will help ensure that your ads reach the most relevant audience at the right time.
Step 7: Apply Creative Assets
Finally, upload your creative assets, including text, images, and video. Performance Max will automatically combine and optimise your assets to show the most effective ads to users across various Google channels.
Be sure to include location-specific details or promotions to increase relevance and engagement with potential customers.
Performance Max for Store Goals: Best Practices
Campaign Setup
- Eligibility: Make sure your account has active location assets, affiliate location assets, or a Business Profile connected to Google Ads.
- Campaign Duration: Run campaigns for at least 30 days to allow performance to stabilise. Shorter campaigns can be effective for time-sensitive goals like promotions or sales events.
- Offline Conversions: Set up your campaign in an account eligible for store visits (from any Google channel) or optimised toward Local Actions (such as calls and directions). Track offline conversions, store visits and in-store interactions.
- Bidding: Maximise conversion value is the default bidding strategy for Performance Max campaigns with store goals, making sure you get the highest value from conversions like store visits or calls. You can also choose Maximise Conversions if you’re focusing more on the volume of actions. Remember to set conversion values for each goal (e.g., store visits = $X, calls = $Y) to ensure effective optimisation.
Creative Assets
- Text Assets: Text assets are crucial to optimise your Performance Max campaign. Upload the required assets such as headlines, descriptions, call-to-actions, and your final URL to ensure compelling ad messaging.
- Video and Image Assets: Your ads must include at least one image, one logo, and a 10-second YouTube video (set to public). If you don’t have a video, Performance Max will automatically generate one using your existing assets.
- Multiple Sets of Creative Assets: If you have multiple sets of creative assets, you can organise them into different ad groups for targeted creative optimisation. Test different combinations of creatives and improve performance over time.
Reporting
- Store Visits and Local Actions Reporting: Store visits and local actions (calls, directions) will be reported by individual store locations. Make sure you monitor these metrics closely to evaluate performance at the store level.
- Data Considerations: Allow 30 days of data to accumulate before analysing the performance of your store goals campaigns. This timeframe ensures enough conversions have occurred for a meaningful analysis.
- Asset-Level Reporting: Utilise the asset-level report to assess which creative assets perform best. The report is updated in real-time to optimise your assets as the campaign progresses and make adjustments quickly.
Additional Tips
- Dayparting: Dayparting (adjusting bids based on time of day) is not supported for Performance Max campaigns with store goals applied.
- Geo-Targeting: When store locations are applied, radius targeting is automatically set around each store. This ensures that only users within a certain radius are targeted. Be aware that if you apply additional geo-targeting, all stores within that radius will be eligible to serve ads.
- Audience Targeting: While audience targeting is not supported for Performance Max campaigns with store goals, you can still use audience hints. This feature helps Google’s machine learning optimise ad delivery to the most relevant users.
By following these best practices, you can fully leverage Performance Max for Store Goals to drive increased foot traffic, boost offline conversions, and optimise your campaigns for the best possible results.
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