One of the main goals of a Performance Max campaign is to attract new customers who are likely to be very happy with the company’s products or services.
A new optimization feature is being added to Google’s Performance Max campaign type which will allow businesses to focus on acquiring new customers who have not previously been customers.
Performance Max has been available to advertisers for the last two years, and has previously faced criticism over the limited control advertisers have over their campaigns. Google is introducing a new feature that will allow it to target potential new customers with better accuracy based on their past data.
The new features will allow users to choose from a number of targeting options. These options include customer match lists, which use first-party data including email, phone, first name, last name and country/zip code. When uploaded Google will provide a match rate that shows how many of your customers have a matching Google account that can be used in targeting.
NB: while Google is presently using this PII information, it is exclusively for first-party data. Customer Match will no longer be permitted in third-party contexts after support for third-party cookies is phased down, but Google will continue to enable Customer Match in first-party circumstances where a publisher has a direct relationship with a customer.
Google has also announced a new autodetection feature in Performance Max which will help advertisers track how customers who have already made a purchase through their ads are likely to be converted. Additionally, Google has built new machine learning models to predict how likely someone is to be a new customer for an advertiser, in order to make up for low match rates. Furthermore, while Pixels are still present in Google Ads, the usage of conversion tags for sales can assist these new PMax targets in excluding non-new users.
Google has access to data from both first parties (such as conversion information and signals from their own websites) and third-party sources (like Performance Max). This allows them to identify previous customers who may not be valuable targets for marketing campaigns.