Note
Access to this page requires authorization. You can try signing in or changing directories.
Access to this page requires authorization. You can try changing directories.
Note
- This feature is available in all Microsoft Advertising markets.
- Support for Performance Max in SA360 is now available.
- We recommend using IndexNow to enhance ad performance for your Performance Max campaigns. By expediting indexing, IndexNow helps search engines update your ads with your most current website content, improving their relevance and effectiveness. See Using IndexNow to enhance ad performance for more information.
- Performance Max campaigns don't currently support video assets.
Please follow the instructions below to create a Performance Max campaign. You can create a maximum of 300 Performance Max campaigns per account. For information about best practices and recommendations for Performance Max campaigns, see Best practices for Performance Max campaigns.
Note
See asset group settings below for information about disallowed characters in your Final URL.
From the navigation menu on the left, select Create.
Choose Drive conversions or Sell products as your campaign goal.
Select Performance Max.
Below Political advertising declaration, you need to declare whether your campaign is intended for political advertising. If your campaign isn't intended for political advertising, select the checkbox next to By selecting Continue, I confirm that this campaign is not intended for political advertising. Otherwise, you must remove any political advertising from your campaign and then proceed. Learn more about how we define political advertising.
Select Continue.
(Optional) Select a Merchant Center store to advertise your products. If you want to deliver Product ads across the entire Microsoft Advertising Network and have already set up a Merchant Center store, then follow these steps:
Choose the store you want to associate with your Performance Max campaign.
Select Start campaign.
Note
To display Product ads, you must select a Merchant Center store. However, if you do not wish to display Product ads, you can skip selecting a store. Keep in mind if you decide to advertise products in the future, you will need to create a new campaign. Additionally, once you select a store for this campaign, you cannot change it.
Follow the steps provided by the campaign creation wizard.
Here's some information about what you'll see in your settings for products, assets, targeting, campaign, and budget, bid strategy, and new customer acquisition:
Product settings
Product settings are only applicable if you chose a Merchant Center store to advertise your products. If you didn't select a store, skip down to asset group settings.
Shopping settings
Choose which products to show in your ads. Please note that some of your ads will use images, headlines, and descriptions from Merchant Center.
- By default, all products from the selected store will be made available to advertise in this campaign. You can choose to Filter by feed label or Filter by country/region of sale.
- Optionally, select Enable local inventory ads.
Listing groups
Listing groups are used to determine which products from your Microsoft Merchant Center catalog should be included in a particular asset group under Performance Max campaigns. Up to 20,000 listing groups can be applied to each asset group. For your listing groups, you can choose to show All products in your ads, or you can select Filtered products. If you select Filtered products:
- Select Add filter.
- Next to Divide by, choose your preferred filter from the dropdown.
- Select the checkbox next to the products you want to show in your ads.
- Select Save.
Asset group settings
Asset group name
Give your asset group a unique name. Your asset groups should be based on your campaign's goal, and it's a good idea to have your asset group's name reflect its goal.
Note
An asset group name cannot contain scripts, HTML, or other markup language.
Text guidelines
Text guidelines let you control the words and phrases used in our AI-generated assets for your campaign. These assets will follow your campaign's text guidelines to help keep your ads aligned with your brand.
AI-generated assets include:
- Asset recommendations. In the campaign creation workflow, we prefill your Short headlines, Long headlines, and Descriptions with our recommendations based on your Final URL and text guidelines. Our recommendations will reflect your excluded terms.
- Autogenerated text assets. In the Campaign details step below, you have the option to enable Text Assets below Autogenerated assets, which means that we'll generate text assets in combination with assets you provide to enhance ad relevance and performance. Your campaign's autogenerated text assets will reflect your excluded terms.
To add your text guidelines, select Edit text guidelines below Term exclusions and enter words or phrases that shouldn't appear in your ads (up to 25).
Note
Enter your Term exclusions before entering your Final URL. Otherwise, our asset recommendations won't reflect your exclusions.
Final URL
This is your landing page URL; in other words, the URL of the page that displays after a customer selects your ad. The Final URL is required and once provided, we'll generate text assets and will download images from your website to be used in Performance Max campaigns. If you have selected to create a Performance Max for selling products from your Merchant Center store, then we'll auto-populate your Final URL based on your Merchant Center settings. Your Final URL's domain must match your Merchant Center store's URL.
Spaces, UTM tags, and tracking templates are disallowed in your Final URL, along with the following characters: <, >, {, }
To review your landing page URL, follow these steps:
- From the navigation menu on the left, select Campaigns.
- Select your Performance Max campaign.
- Select Asset groups.
- Select Summary.
- Select Edit asset group.
- Review your Final URL.
Images
Add images to your ads. You may use an image from your existing images, Website images, Stock images, Social, or upload an image. See this article for information about best practices for image assets.
Note
You can add up to 20 images. You only need one wide (rectangle) image, sized 1200 x 628 pixels or higher (minimum 703 x 368 pixels). However, we recommend the maximum amount of images possible. Then, we'll automatically crop your image so that it can serve in placements that use the aspect ratios below. However, to serve in specific aspect ratios, they must meet the minimum image dimensions per aspect ratio.
Aspect ratios:
- 1:1 (Minimum dimensions: 300 x 300. Recommended: 1200 x 1200.)
- 1:2 (Minimum dimensions: 470 x 940. Recommended: 600 x 1200.)
- 4:1 (Minimum dimensions: 608 x 152. Recommended: 1200 x 300.)
1.24:1 (Minimum dimensions: 104 x 84. Recommended: 1200 x 968.) -
1.53:1 (Minimum dimensions: 306 x 200. Recommended: 1200 x 785.) -
1.69:1 (Minimum dimensions: 628 x 372. Recommended: 1200 x 710.) -
1.91:1 (Minimum dimensions: 703 x 368. Recommended: 1200 x 628.)
- 2.01:1 (Minimum dimensions: 612 x 304. Recommended: 1200 x 598.)
Logos (optional)
Add brand logos to your ads.
Note
You can add up to five logos with the minimum dimensions of 128 x 128 pixels. If you add a logo to your asset group and a logo extension is present at the account level, the asset group's logo will take priority during ad delivery. Additionally, if you've added logos to a brand kit at the campaign level and to an asset group in that same campaign, the campaign-level logo will be prioritized during ad delivery. For more information about brand kits, see About Ads Studio.
Headlines
Enter up to 15 Short headlines and up to five Long headlines. Both are required for display flexibility. Short headlines must be 30 characters or fewer and long headlines must be 90 characters or fewer.
Description
Enter up to five ad descriptions. Descriptions must be 90 characters or fewer. This is the most visible text of the ad and allows for more character space to engage with potential customers.
Business name
Enter your Business name. Depending on your ad's placement, your business name may appear in your ad.
Note
A business name cannot contain scripts, HTML, or other markup language.
Call to action
Choose a Call to action from the predefined list. This will provide potential customers with a brief, compelling reason to click your ad right now.
Note
“Automated” is the default option for your Call to action. If you don't choose a Call to action from the predefined list, then it will be automated by default during ad delivery to help boost campaign performance. This means that we'll automatically choose your Call to action and the language it serves in.
Ad extensions
Ad extensions are additional pieces of information about your business that you can add. We'll feature the ad extensions that are most relevant to your selected campaign goal. Learn more about ad extensions.
Path
A simplified webpage address that appears in your ads, similar to the display URL in text ads. Please note that the Path is distinct from the Final URL. The Final URL is the actual webpage URL that customers are taken to after they select your ad. The Path can be a shorter or friendlier version of your URL showing one or two subdirectories.
Mobile URL
Add a Mobile URL where potential customers go to after selecting your ad on mobile devices. For more information about Mobile URLs, please see Can I set a separate URL for my mobile website?
URL rules and custom labels
Add URL rules and custom labels to target certain webpages on your website. URL rules send traffic to the most relevant pages of your website when it's likely to result in better performance. Custom labels are associated with your page feeds and allow you to focus on specific categories of pages to help generate relevant ads. Please note that when a page feed is associated with your campaign and no URL rules are added, your ads will only use the URLs provided in your page feed which contain your asset group's Final URL. For example, if your asset group's Final URL is contoso.co.dk/teahouse and your page feed is formatted as contoso.co.dk/tea/herbal, we won't be able to match them and won't deliver any ads.
Note
Your campaign will target all webpages associated with your Final URL by default.
URL rules: Use the “contains” operator to target URLs, categories, page titles, or page content that contains specific words or a specific sequence of characters. If you use the "and" condition (for example, URL contains "food" and URL contains "delivery"), make sure that you have webpages that meet all the specified conditions on your website.
A "page title" is the text that appears at the top of a webpage—in your website's code, it's the text in this area:
<head> <title>This is the page title</title> </head>"Page content" is the visible text on a webpage—in your website's code, it's the text between these tags:
<body></body>Custom labels: Use custom labels from your page feeds to specify which categories of pages you want to target to help generate ads.
Note
To use custom labels, you must have a page feed associated with your campaign.
Start and end dates
Choose when you want your ads to run.
Targeting settings
Location
This is where you want your ads to appear. You can target or exclude specific countries/regions, states/provinces, cities, or zip/postal codes. Learn more about how language and location targeting affect who can see your ads.
Language
This is the language you'll write your ads in. This should match the language of the sites that you'd like your ads to appear on. Learn more about language options in Microsoft Advertising.
Audience signals (optional)
Create an audience signal or choose from your existing audience signals. We'll use them as a starting point to find customers and determine who sees your ads. Learn more about audience signals. We recommend providing audience signals as this can reduce learning period for the campaign as well as improve overall performance.
Search themes (optional)
Search themes are an optimization tactic. Enter search themes (words or phrases) associated with your campaign to help optimize it. Search themes act as signals to help us reduce the learning period and get your campaign up and running quicker. They also help determine who sees your ads and are intended to drive conversions, but they don't limit ad reach. You can refresh your search themes on an ongoing basis (i.e., every few months) to help your campaign perform well. See this article for more information about best practices for search themes.
This is an asset group-level feature and can be provided during asset group creation or editing. You can create asset groups relevant to specific search themes/audience signals to better reach your audience. Up to 50 search themes can be included, and each theme can be 80 characters or less.
Note
Customers will not see any of the search themes in your ads. The search themes act as signals to help during the learning period by letting us know how to better target your ads to the right customers at the right time.
Context exclusions (optional)
Note
Not everyone has excluded content terms yet. If you don't, don't worry—it's coming soon!
Context exclusions help ensure your ads show in contexts that are relevant to your business and suitable for your brand. Context exclusions consist of excluded content terms and negative keywords.
Excluded content terms block your ads from showing next to unwanted terms (i.e., page titles). For example, if you're selling tech devices and your excluded content term is “faulty tech devices,” then we won't show your ads next to page titles mentioning faulty tech devices. Any excluded content terms you add will be automatically applied to all campaigns in your account to save you time later. For more information about viewing and managing your excluded content terms at the account level, see About content suitability.
Negative keywords prevent your ads from being shown with certain search queries. Negative phrase match is the default negative keyword match type, which you can edit after creating your campaign by going to Campaigns > Negative keywords. See this article to learn more about negative keywords.
You can choose to add a prompt and let AI help generate negative keywords and excluded content terms for you, or you can enter them manually. To add your prompt:
- Select Add prompt next to Need help? Describe your exclusions and we'll create negative keywords and excluded content terms.
- Below Describe your exclusions, enter your exclusions. Then, we'll automatically generate negative keywords and excluded content terms for you. Please note that you can always edit or remove them.
For more information about adding negative keywords and negative keyword lists after campaign creation, see this help page. If you want to change your negative keyword match type, follow these steps after creating your campaign:
- From the navigation menu on the left, select Campaigns.
- Select the appropriate Performance Max campaign.
- Select Negative keywords.
- In the Match type column, select the pencil icon for the appropriate negative keyword.
- Choose Phrase or Exact from the dropdown menu.
- Select Save.
Campaign details
Campaign name
Give your campaign a unique name. It's a good idea to have your campaign's name reflect its goal.
Note
A campaign name cannot contain scripts, HTML, or other markup language.
Ad schedule
Select Ad schedule if you want to show your ads only on certain days or certain times of day. Learn more about ad schedule settings: How can I get my ads in front of my customers?
Conversions
This allows you to specify which actions to count as conversions, as recorded by UET. You have two options for choosing conversion goals:
- Use your account's Include in “Conversions” setting. This applies your account's conversion goals to this campaign. To see which conversion goals are included in your account settings: From the navigation menu on the left, hover over Conversions and select Conversion goals.
- Choose specific conversion goals for this campaign.
Note
Conversions for your store visit goals are only included at the account and campaign levels, and only if your campaigns have enough ad clicks to pass our privacy thresholds.
Learn more about conversion goals: What are conversion goals and goal types?
Autogenerated assets (optional)
Note
-
Note
Previously, any Performance Max campaign serving only Product ads with autogenerated assets enabled failed to serve autogenerated assets. This was an error, and we have fixed the issue.
- If your Performance Max campaign serves Product ads and has autogenerated assets enabled, then it'll now serve autogenerated assets in your ads in addition to the assets associated with your feed file. Your ads will be eligible to serve in both Search and Product ad placements. This includes any Smart Shopping campaigns with autogenerated assets enabled that were upgraded to Performance Max.
This setting allows Microsoft Advertising to automatically generate assets to enhance ad relevance and performance. We use information pulled from your Final URL as well as any assets you provide to automatically generate additional assets for your ads when available.
Choose which assets you'd like us to automatically generate by selecting the checkbox next to Text assets, Image assets, and/or Final URL expansion. Below Text assets, you can select Edit text guidelines and update or add your Term exclusions. Your campaign's autogenerated text assets will reflect your excluded terms.
Final URL expansion navigates traffic to relevant URLs on your website to drive better results, including the URLs provided in your page feeds. For more information about how page feeds and Final URL expansion interact, see About Performance Max page feeds. See Deleting autogenerated assets for more information about deleting autogenerated text assets from your asset groups.
-
Page feeds
Upload all the relevant URLs for your campaign by spreadsheet. For more information about setting up page feeds for Performance Max campaigns, see About Performance Max page feeds.
Campaign URL options (optional)
Set up the tracking and redirect information for your ads. Learn more about including tracking templates or URL parameters in your final URL.
Brand exclusions
This setting allows you to add brand lists for the branded search queries you don't want your ads to serve on. Learn more about brand exclusions.
Disclaimers
This setting allows you to inform customers about specific information related to your business or products. For more information, see Disclaimer in ads.
Note
Disclaimers are available for Performance Max campaigns that don't serve Product ads (i.e., campaigns without a catalog feed file).
FAQ
Budget, bid strategy, and new customer acquisition
Budget
This is the amount of money you want to spend per day.
Note
A constrained budget hinders Performance Max campaign optimization. It's best to give Performance Max campaigns up to two to three times the budget of your historical standalone campaigns in Microsoft Advertising, due to Performance Max serving across multiple ad formats and inventory.
Here are the benefits and drawbacks of smaller versus larger budgets:
Smaller budget
Pros:
- You can test how well your budget performs without committing a large amount of money.
Cons:
- A constrained budget won't provide enough data for accurate optimization and insights.
- With fewer conversion opportunities and potential budget exhaustion, it'll take longer to gather meaningful results and make adjustments during the learning period.
- Your campaign might not reach a wide enough audience for significant performance improvements.
Larger budget
Pros:
- Ample budget will provide enough data for accurate optimization and insights.
- A larger budget offers faster campaign learning periods which gather meaningful results to help you meet your performance goals.
- Get wider available reach by finding more conversion opportunities that drive results.
Cons:
- There's greater financial risk if the campaign doesn't initially perform well.
- A larger budget requires more oversight to ensure that the funds are used effectively, and that the campaign is seeing results.
Bid strategy
Note
We highly recommend setting up conversion tracking to take full advantage of our automated bid strategies.
Note
If you don't have a conversion goal in Microsoft Advertising during Performance Max campaign creation, we'll automatically convert your campaign's bid strategy to maximize clicks. Once you create a conversion goal, we'll track a sufficient amount of conversion data and then your Performance Max campaign will automatically switch to your selected conversion-based bid strategy. Please note that you can always change the bid strategy in your campaign settings.
Your bid strategy setting tells Microsoft Advertising how you want to manage your bids. With automated bidding for Performance Max, we automatically adjust your bids to optimize your campaign and meet your performance goals. You can choose from these options:
- Maximize conversion value: This bid strategy focuses on optimizing high-value conversions and the total sales value of your campaign. We'll automatically set your bids in real time to maximize total conversion value within your budget. If you have specific return on investment (ROI) goals, you can choose to add a Target ROAS (return on ad spend). To learn more about Target ROAS, please see Let Microsoft Advertising manage your bids with bid strategies.
- Maximize conversions: With this bid strategy type, Microsoft Advertising automatically sets your bids in real time to get as many conversions as possible within your budget. If you have specific ROI goals, you can choose to add a Target CPA (cost per acquisition). To learn more about Target CPA, please see Let Microsoft Advertising manage your bids with bid strategies.
Learn more about auto-bidding: Let Microsoft Advertising manage your bids with bid strategies
Optimize for new customer acquisition
Note
- Not everyone has this feature yet. If you don't, don't worry—it's coming soon!
- To learn more about new customer acquisition for campaigns imported from Google Ads, see What gets imported from Google Ads.
When enabled, this setting helps your campaign drive conversions by reaching new customers who are ready to make purchases. You have two options for new customer acquisition:
Increase bids for new customers: This increases your bids for new customers while continuing to bid for existing customers. If you choose this option, you must:
- Set Maximize conversion value as your bid strategy.
- Create a Purchase conversion goal at the account level. Learn more about creating conversion goals.
- Select at least one audience list. Your audience list will help us optimize for targeting new customers during ad delivery.
Bid only for new customers: This optimizes your bids to target new customers exclusively. If you choose this option, you must select at least one audience list. Your audience list will help us optimize for targeting only new customers during ad delivery.
If you enable Optimize for new customer acquisition, then you need to add your customer acquisition settings at the account level:
If you haven't yet added your customer acquisition settings at the account level, you can do so during Performance Max campaign creation:
Select Set up new customer acquisition within your Budget settings below Optimize for new customer acquisition.
Enter the Conversion value for new customers and optionally add an audience list.
Note
If you choose Bid only for new customers as your optimization strategy, then you'll need to add an audience list.
Select Save.
You can also add your customer acquisition settings at the account level from the Conversion goals page:
From the navigation menu on the left, hover over Conversions and select Conversion goals.
Select Customer acquisition.
Select Create.
Enter the Conversion value for new customers and optionally add an audience list.
Note
If you choose Bid only for new customers as your optimization strategy, then you'll need to add an audience list.
Select Save.
Listing groups
You can use listing groups to view and analyze product-level performance within your Performance Max campaign.
Navigate to listing groups
- From the navigation menu on the left, select Campaigns.
- Select your Performance Max campaign.
- Select Listing groups to view all listing groups associated with the campaign.
View Listing group Metrics
In the listing group view, select Columns > Modify columns.
- Select Add next to individual metrics, or
- Select Add all columns to include all available metrics.
- Select Apply to save your column selections.
Note
Review your settings in the Summary page and select Go live or Don't go live.
Deleting autogenerated assets
Follow these instructions to delete any autogenerated assets that you don't want to serve in your ads:
- From the navigation menu on the left, select Campaigns.
- Select the appropriate Performance Max campaign.
- Select Asset groups.
- In the Assets column, select View asset details for the appropriate asset group.
- Select the checkbox next to the autogenerated asset you want to delete.
- Select Delete in the blue action bar.
Note
Once an asset is deleted it cannot be restored. You can still view asset reports for 30 days after deletion.