How to Master Performance Max for Microsoft Advertising 

If you work in digital marketing, there’s no doubt you’ve heard the term “Performance Max” countless times over the last few years. When layered on top of your existing advertising strategy, Performance Max can drive incremental conversions to your business and boost advertisers’ overall ROI.

In fact, when combining Performance Max and search campaigns, advertisers are seeing a 32% decrease in cost per acquisition (CPA) and a 3x increase in return on ad spend (ROAS) on average, compared to running search campaigns alone.  However, we particularly need to know how to leverage and optimise Performance Max for Microsoft Advertising specifically to be able to drive these results.

To understand better, start by imagining the Performance Max campaign type as a flower. To flourish, it needs certain conditions – ample sunlight, water, and nutrients, and the right size pot! Without these, the campaign won’t perform well. Let’s start with sunlight.

1. Sunlight equals data

Without sunlight, flowers won’t grow. The same can be said for Performance Max and data. To enable PMax to flourish and achieve your goals, it’s important to provide the campaign with meaningful data, and strike a balance between volume and value-based strategy. This ensures it can deliver both quantity and quality. Here’s a few things to bear in mind on this point when thinking about Performance Max for Microsoft Advertising in particular:

• UET Tracking: Although you can set up Performance Max for Microsoft Advertising without a Microsoft UET tag, the campaign would optimise towards clicks using eCPC. If you have CPA and ROAS targets, we wouldn’t recommend this unless you’re measuring success of the campaign solely on click growth. Ensure your UET tag is functioning accurately so you can optimise towards revenue-based goals. If it’s not, contact your account team or support to help you set this up.
• Your PMax Structure: Have you copied the exact structure from Google because it worked well there? Ensure you have enough data volumes coming through Microsoft for the same structure to be effective. We recommend at least 30 conversions in the last 30 days for the account. If you’re just hitting this and planning to launch multiple PMax campaigns, consider consolidating them and splitting by asset group instead.
• Micro Conversions: If data volumes on Microsoft are limited, consider adding micro conversions to provide additional data signals to the algorithm. Actions like ‘adds to basket’ and ‘checkout starts’ serve as good intent signals outside of solely purchases.

Once a flower has ample sunlight, we can plant our flower. However, flowers must be planted in a pot that’s big enough for them to grow.

2. The pot equals the budget

A flower needs a large enough pot with enough room, especially during the germination stage, to grow to its full potential. The same can be said for Performance Max for Microsoft Advertising; it requires enough budget, especially during the learning period for it to generate good volumes and growth for your business. Here are a few pointers for managing this with Microsoft:

• Set your budget to 2-3 times that of your standard campaigns: Look at how much your standard/smart shopping campaigns are spending and allocate 2-3 times that amount for PMax. This is necessary because it will show across a wider variety of inventory.
• Ensure top-ups during learning: While the campaign is in its learning period, it’s especially important to ensure the budget is topped up to avoid capping out. Budget constraints hinder PMax optimisation, causing longer learning periods and volatile performance. Ideally, you want to be able to spend freely in the first 2-4 weeks as data comes in and the campaign learns, before tweaking performance towards your goals later.

Once your flower has sprouted and sufficient room to grow, you can begin adding more nutrients.

Water and nutrients are assets & optimisations

In this analogy, water represents your campaign assets. Just as a flower needs plenty of water to grow, your campaign needs plenty of assets. On top of that, flowers need nutrients to develop into strong plants and to ensure they don’t wilt too early, just as a campaign needs a good optimisation strategy to succeed. For Performance Max for Microsoft Advertising, this initial learning period typically takes 2-4 weeks, or 2-3 conversion cycles (the amount of time it takes for a click to result in a conversion) if your business has longer customer decision journeys. These best practices will not only help your Performance Max campaign accelerate the learning period, but also increase conversions over time:

• Target CPA/ROAS: Campaigns can start learning with or without a target. Targets can serve as helpful baseline signals but don’t significantly impact the learning period speed.
  • Including a Target: Start with a less restrictive goal (based on other campaign targets) to enable faster learning. Gradually adjust as the campaign ramps up.
  • Without a Target: Let the campaign run until it achieves 30+ conversions. Then, use the average CPA/ROAS as the campaign’s target. From there you adjust the target in increments of up to +/-20% increments to avoid volatility.
  • Stability During Learning: Avoid changing settings or conversion goals during the learning period. Change targets every 2-4 weeks depending on the campaign size, ensuring previous changes have taken effect before further adjustments.
• Asset Management: Add as many assets as possible to provide sufficient creative and copy for the campaign to learn. When making changes to assets, edit existing asset groups instead of creating new ones. Avoid assets with text overlay.
• Search Themes and Audience Signals: Incorporate remarketing, custom audiences, and customer match as they are strong signals for Performance Max.
  • Unique Microsoft Capabilities: Use LinkedIn data to build in-market audiences from job titles and company sizes to leverage unique data signals unavailable elsewhere

Mastering Performance Max for Microsoft Advertising requires a tailored approach that acknowledges the unique features and capabilities of the platform. If you were growing a plant, you’d ensure it had sunlight, a large enough pot, plenty of water and nutrients to thrive. The same can be said for PMax with data volumes, budget, optimisations and assets. Remember, the goal is not to simply replicate a strategy that might be working on other platforms, but to adapt and refine it to leverage the strengths of Microsoft Advertising. By following these steps, you’ll be well on your way to gaining incremental conversions for your business at a strong ROI, and a successful Performance Max campaign that delivers exceptional results.