Performance Max Updates Offer Increased Transparency

Ok, Google. I see you giving a little more control to Performance Max advertisers.

These updates don’t solve the network distribution problem (highlighted here) — and I wouldn’t hold your breath for that level of transparency. But they’re a step in the right direction.

Here are the updates that you should jump on:

1. Data at the asset group level
You’ll now be able to see conversions, conversion value, cost, and more at the asset group level. The lack of this data when PMax was first launched was astonishing. This addition increases the importance of smartly defined asset groups. It opens up the opportunity for more granular audience segmentation.

2. Campaign-level brand exclusions
Although you could previously have your Google rep to implement these exclusions if you begged nicely, it will now be available in the interface to all. If our hypothesis about Google exploiting brand search and shopping traffic to buoy investment in upper funnel channels is correct, then this capability is a strong solution. It allows you to send brand traffic to your separate search and shopping campaigns, keeping data pure and putting more responsibility on your PMax campaigns to go find those new customers.

3. Page exclusions
You can now tell Google to exclude certain pages from PMax consideration. If you have blog content that you don’t think makes the best ad landing page experience, for example, you can now exclude those pages from PMax. You can also use labels to group together large swaths of pages and exclude them from certain asset groups. Similar to the asset group level data, this update also increases the importance of proper asset group structure.

Other updates are mildly interesting — video creation/editing tools, budget pacing insights — but less likely to move the needle the way these top three will. Time will tell if this change is the first in a line of transparency updates or a placating crumb that Google is throwing advertisers’ way.