Can Performance Max campaigns work for lead generation?

Short answer: Yes.

I have a client who can't get any more leads from Google search ads. We've done all the usual stuff: broad match keywords; more than enough budget; a generous target CPA. And it worked. Over the years we have grown the lead count from fewer than 100 per month to about 3,000 per month. But there is a constraint on growth. We can't advertise outside their immediate area. People have to come to one of their offices.

Like many veteran PPC people, I was skeptical about Performance Max campaigns (PMax). The early results were poor: a flood of spam and junk leads that never converted.

But it has been my experience that new Google Ads features are terrible for the first year or two. Then something changes and they work as advertised. I have seen this happen with expanded search ads, broad match keywords, automated bidding and so on. Perhaps PMax has matured. Perhaps it can now find leads that search cannot.

To give PMax a fair chance, I needed an account with the right ingredients.

This account was a good candidate for testing PMax

Here is why:

• It had the best offline conversion tracking I have seen. We tracked leads through the entire sales funnel, from first click to initial and later sales. This let us judge the ads by their real contributions to the business, not just by impressions, clicks or leads.
• We have a lot of data, about 9,000 leads in Google's 90-day conversion window.
• The client was comfortable experimenting. If the campaign did not perform, no one was going to point fingers.
• We had enough budget for a proper test.
• Our landing pages converted well. If PMax could bring the right people to the site, we would convert them to leads.
• The contact forms had bulletproof spam prevention. Many PMax campaigns fail because of the spam death spiral. A few cheap spam leads get recorded as conversions, and the algorithm starts chasing more of the same.
• We also had proven ad creatives. The client’s social media team had tested plenty of ads. I had them package their best performers for Google.

In short, we could give PMax a fair test. But, I had doubts about whether PMax could deliver leads that would actually convert.

Challenges with using PMax for lead generation

This was the first PMax campaign I had built. None of my peers were using them for lead generation, so I could not get advice on what to do or avoid.

Our landing pages are optimised to get people to make contact and arrange a consultation. This works well with search campaigns because we show ads when people are looking for help. But PMax ads show when people are doing something else, such as watching videos, reading email or browsing the news. I did not know if the pages would convert.

PMax shows ads in places where poor quality clicks are common. There is little way to control this, which often leads to spam.

Before launching, I needed to decide how to judge success.

Focusing on the right KPIs

With excellent visibility into the sales funnel, I had plenty of options to choose from.

Trying to focus on more than one or two key performance indicators (KPIs) is a recipe for information overload. You end up second guessing decisions or chasing conflicting signals. One KPI looks good, another looks bad, and it is unclear which one to act on.

In practice, effective campaign management comes from choosing a small set of KPIs that align with business goals.

I discarded:

• Impressions, clicks and cost per click. These are useful for diagnosing problems but unrelated to the value created.
• Conversion rate, again, generally a diagnostic metric.
• Number of leads and cost per lead. PMax campaigns often generate spam leads. Although we block spam from forms, we cannot block spam calls, so these metrics would be unreliable.

I could have judged the campaign by sales rate, revenue or ROI, but this wouldn't account for variability in the sales process. I wanted to assess the campaign on its own merits, not on whether a lead happened to speak to a weak salesperson on a bad day.

I settled on booked appointments as my key metric.

The only way to book is through a call centre. The call centre pre-qualifies leads before offering appointments. So any lead who booked would be legit, in the area, and wanting what the client sells.

I had also considered using "attended appointments" as a KPI. I had dug into the data for this client and others. The pattern was the same. Attendance rates were mostly driven by how far in advance the appointment was booked. The shorter the gap, the more likely people were to show up.

Here’s how I set up the first test campaign.

How I set up the test campaign

For operational reasons, the account is split into several campaigns, each targeting the area around one of the offices. I aimed my test PMax campaign at the area around the busiest office.

• I set up one asset group with one search theme. I used the best Facebook image ads and the minimum required text assets. The headlines and descriptions came from my top performing search ads.

• I disabled automatic ad creation wherever I could find it. The client works in a regulated field and I did not want Google making claims we could not support.

• I had a generous testing budget, but I was cautious. I restricted the daily budget to about half of the search campaign for the same area.

• I used the Maximise conversions bid strategy with a cheeky Target CPA of $50) and only the booked appointment conversion action set to primary.

Once the campaign was running, I took a hands-off approach on purpose.

Very lazy campaign management

If this campaign were a child, social services would have arrested me. I set it up and haven't fed it since. But that was intentional.

PMax campaigns don't give you many levers to pull, and until recently, they didn't show much of the data you would need to fine tune things anyway. The implicit promise is that if you feed it the right signals, it will handle optimisation for you.

I didn't want to more of my life trying to exclude search terms or chase down dodgy placements. I wanted to see whether PMax could manage itself using offline conversion data. Bookings, in this case.

After the learning period, here’s what I saw.

PMax vs Search Results

The first week’s performance fluctuated wildly, as expected during the learning phase. I excluded this period from my analysis.

The table below shows results for the first three weeks after the learning stage, compared with the search campaign for the same office.

Unexpected wins from PMax

• PMax leads booked appointments at roughly the same rate as search leads. I had expected them to be much lower quality.
• The cost per booked appointment from PMax was less than half the cost from search.
• And although I had discarded ROI as a KPI, I had to look. PMax turned $1 of ad spend into $7 of profit. Better than our mature search campaign.

Caveats and plans

I don't if the PMax campaign cannibalised any of the search traffic. I have no way to measure this, so for now I am ignoring it.

The good initial results might be a honeymoon phase. I plan to roll out PMax campaigns for all offices and will keep a close eye on the results.

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