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Best practices for Performance Max campaigns

Note

  • Performance Max campaigns serving product ads should receive their first impressions within three days of enablement. All other Performance Max campaigns should receive their first impressions within four days of enablement.
  • The campaign learning period can take either two to four weeks or two to three conversion cycles to stabilize. If your campaign experiences a longer learning period, escalate to your account manager or contact Support.

You can set up your Performance Max campaign for success by using our best practices and recommendations. To ensure that your campaign is running optimally and meeting your advertising goals, keep the following in mind:

  • Set up conversion tracking to take full advantage of our automated bid strategies.

  • Performance Max campaigns can optionally use a Target CPA (cost per acquisition) for the Maximize conversions bid strategy, or Target ROAS (return on ad spend) for the Maximize conversion value bid strategy. Adding these targets can be helpful for campaign optimization, especially during the learning period.

    • If you choose to add a Target CPA or Target ROAS, start with a less restrictive target amount (based on other campaign targets within your account) to enable faster learning. We don't recommend changing the target frequently and suggest waiting two weeks after each change before updating the amount again. Then, you can gradually update the target as needed.
    • We recommend adding a Target ROAS after you've accrued a minimum of 30 conversions within the last 30 days, so we can calculate the required bid values to best achieve your target.

  • Use the bid landscape tool for suggested bid targets based on historical data and market conditions.

  • Ensure that your budget isn't too small, so it won't constrain campaign performance. Ample budget allows for better optimization, faster learning periods, and wider available reach. For more information about budgets for Performance Max, see About budgets for Performance Max.

  • Add as many assets as possible to your campaign and enable Autogenerated assets. Make sure to include a wide variety of assets that will resonate with your audience. Use asset groups to organize your campaign (for instance, you could organize your asset groups by market, promotion, and/or the audiences you want to target). For more information about autogenerated assets, see Create a Performance Max campaign.

  • Reach your audience and optimize your campaign by adding Search themes and Audience signals. For audience signals, please note that adding remarketing lists, custom audiences, and customer match lists provide strong baseline signals for campaign optimization. For more information about audience signals, see About audience signals. See Best practices for search themes to learn more about best practices for search themes.

  • If you run a Website URL report, review our best practices for interpreting the report and search term data.

About conversion cycles

Conversion cycles are the amount of time it takes for an ad click to result in a conversion. The duration of a conversion cycle depends on the products and services you sell. For example, online shopping and food delivery services typically have a short conversion cycle (about one day), whereas advertisers selling automobiles and insurance experience longer conversion cycles over multiple weeks.

The learning period for Performance Max campaigns can take two to four weeks or two to three conversion cycles, depending on conversion volume, duration of the conversion cycle, and external factors such as seasonality.

About budgets for Performance Max

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.

The table below shows the benefits and drawbacks of smaller versus larger budgets:

  • Smaller budget

    Pros Cons
    You can test how well your budget performs without committing a large amount of money. 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 Cons
    Ample budget will provide enough data for accurate optimization and insights. There's greater financial risk if the campaign doesn't initially perform well.
    A larger budget offers faster campaign learning periods which gather meaningful results to help you meet your performance goals. A larger budget requires more oversight to ensure that the funds are used effectively, and that the campaign is seeing results.
    Get wider available reach by finding more conversion opportunities that drive results.

    Note

    For more information about best practices and recommendations for Performance Max campaigns, see The perfect time to set up Performance Max campaigns and How to increase conversions from Performance Max.

Best practices for image assets

  • Use high-resolution .JPG or .PNG images, so they don't pixelate or degrade across screens.
  • Before you upload your images, make sure they meet the imagery guidelines.
  • If you don't have advertising-ready images, Microsoft Advertising has partnered with Shutterstock with free access to over 300 million commercially licensed images. To learn more, see About stock images.
  • We don't recommend images with text or logo overlays because they may appear distorted in different aspect ratios and ad placements. Some publishers may also prohibit the use of embedded text within images. Your text and logos may appear invisible or may be cut off in smaller ad placements or when images are resized. Make sure to use your Ad text, Short headline, and Long headline for all ad messaging. If text is required for legal or other reasons, we recommend using as few words as possible, small font size, and centered text.
  • Review your images in the ad preview tool before saving your ad to ensure that they look as expected. Re-crop your images as necessary.

Best practices for search themes

Search themes are an optimization tactic. You can add up to 50 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.

Note

Customers won't see any of the search themes in your ads.

Here are a few tips for using search themes:

  • Create asset groups relevant to specific search themes/audience signals to better reach your audience.
  • Refresh your search themes on an ongoing basis (i.e., every few months) to help your campaign learn.
  • Use search themes as a powerful tool for event-specific asset groups and campaigns (i.e., Black Friday and New Year's sales).
  • Run a search term insights report to find strong performing search queries to leverage for your search themes.

How to interpret Website URL reports and search term data

When you run Performance Max campaigns, reporting data such as website URLs, publishers, and search terms should be interpreted carefully.

Performance Max algorithms focus on overall campaign performance, not individual placements or queries. This means not every row in your report is actionable.

  • Best practices:

  • Evaluate campaign-level performance first.

    Performance Max algorithms evaluate signals across all auctions collectively, not one placement at a time, so avoid making decisions based on isolated performance. A specific website or query may look less impactful on its own, but it can still contribute to overall campaign performance and learning.

  • Wait until you have enough data over time before making decisions.

    Avoid excluding websites based on limited data. Removing sites can reduce your available supply and limit the signals Performance Max relies on to find and convert users. This is especially important since Performance Max optimizes across all networks.

    Don't take action based on:

    • Low volume
    • Short timeframes
    • Early performance signals

  • Focus on business outcomes instead of impression, clicks, and other traffic metrics.

    Optimize based on your conversion-driven metrics:

    • Conversions
    • Conversion value
    • Cost per acquisition (CPA) and return on ad spend (ROAS)

    Avoid optimizing based on traffic-driven metrics:

    • Impressions
    • Clicks
    • Cost per click (CPC)

  • Not all reported data is actionable.

    You may see:

    • Websites or queries with impressions but no clicks
    • Low-volume placements or queries

    This is expected behavior. Performance Max algorithms test a broad range of placements and queries as part of how they learn and optimize. Websites with no clicks or conversions still provide valuable optimization signals, helping the algorithm understand what does and doesn't work, so it can improve results.

    Avoid excluding placements based on:

    • Low impressions
    • No clicks
    • Short observation periods
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