Campaign-level keywords increase the viability of peak performance

[samiaseo55]

We're certainly excited that Google is adding campaign-level negative keywords to Performance Max, but we'd also like to warn advertisers and marketers not to rely too heavily on it.

Performance Max isn't about over-optimizing keywords. It's about providing the right inputs, such as audience signals, product data, online and offline conversion tracking, so that you can directly negate what's not working.

Nevertheless, these changes are welcome in certain cases.

For example, if we were running multiple facebook data lead-gen campaigns for a client in a specific healthcare industry group, Performance Max wasn’t a good fit for this type of campaign, so we avoided it. Performance Max tends to drive traffic that we know will never convert into customers.

These changes allow us to run campaigns in Performance Max more comfortably. They will have a slightly lower budget, or they may not have strong enough signals, or even offline measurement. But we can finally use all the negative keywords that we know will never work in this industry.

Would Performance Max block the vast majority of negative keywords if I could provide it with the right conversion tracking and data signals? Most likely yes. But sometimes we are unable to input this data or we prefer to block unprofitable ad campaigns so as not to waste money during the learning period.

Imagine smaller ecommerce brands with limited budgets in the early stages of Performance Max trying to acquire and accumulate data. These accounts will soon be able to monitor search statistics and block something before the system has accumulated enough data to know what works and what doesn’t.