Since Performance Max campaigns were announced by Google three years ago, they have become a mainstay of their advertising platform. Performance Max is essentially all the different types of advertising campaigns rolled into one, with the ability to appear across all of Google’s channels, including Search, Display, and YouTube.
Beyond being a powerful campaign type for advertisers, Performance Max has also doubled as a testing ground for Google’s latest and greatest AI-powered features. In Google’s own words, Performance Max campaigns use Google AI “across bidding, budget optimization, audiences, creatives, attribution, and more.”
Brand guidelines are the latest beta test of Google’s AI, and are part of a new customization feature that is being rolled out to Performance Max campaigns. Here’s how to use them, and how they can improve campaign performance.
When you create a Performance Max campaign, Google AI detects certain key brand elements by examining your final URL, and extracts them for you to use in your campaign. These are known as brand guidelines. Google AI will pull things like your business name and logos, which are known as brand assets. It will also pull primary and secondary brand colors and even fonts, which are known as brand controls. Users can review these elements to make sure that they align with their objectives, and tweak their brand guidelines as needed.
Brand assets are required by Performance Max campaigns, since they consist of some of the more vital identifying features of a company. Besides the name of the business, advertisers will need at least one logo, though they can have up to five.
Brand controls like fonts and colors are optional, and can be used to further control how your brand is represented by a Performance Max campaign. They can be used across autogenerated videos on YouTube or responsive display ads on the Google Display Network.
Interested in trying out brand guidelines? As long as you’re using the English language version of Google Ads, you can find them by going to your Performance Max campaign settings, either during or after campaign/asset group creation.
Brand guidelines help advertisers control how a brand is represented in their Performance Max campaigns. You can provide users with more consistent and on-brand messaging with assets pulled directly from your website, which could improve campaign performance. And, because these assets and controls can be reused across Performance Max campaigns, you don’t have to re-pull vital brand controls, saving you time.
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