About Performance Max campaigns

About Performance Max campaigns

Performance Max is an asset-focused campaign type that allows you to easily create and manage your campaigns, optimize ads to reach the right audience at the right time, and drive performance to meet advertising goals—across the entire Microsoft Advertising Network. Rather than manually creating ads one by one, you can save time by adding assets, such as text and images, to your asset groups and let us take care of the rest.

Microsoft AI will determine which assets and audiences are best for your ads based on your campaign and asset group settings. We'll ensure that your ads have optimal asset combinations, capturing the attention of customers who are ready to buy your product or service. For information on creating your Performance Max campaign, please see Create a Performance Max campaign.

The benefits of using Performance Max campaigns

• Save time. You provide the assets in your asset groups, and we'll automatically optimize your ads for the highest performance.
• Use real-time automation to maximize your return on investment (ROI). Using AI, Performance Max campaigns stay on top of consumer trends to determine the best asset combinations for your ads. Then, your ads are updated in real-time to enhance conversion value and help meet your campaign goals.
• Easily manage your campaign. Reduce the manual load of managing multiple campaigns with Performance Max's campaign optimization. You can advertise your products and services with a single simple-to-manage campaign, and our automation will ensure you're delivering ads that drive performance.

Use Performance Max when you want to:

• Meet specific performance goals, such as increasing sales and driving potential customers to your website.
• Enhance your return on ad spend and maximize reach across the entire Microsoft Advertising Network.
• Display your ads across the entire Microsoft Advertising Network with a single campaign.
• Expand your ad reach and increase conversion value by serving search, audience, and product ads.

Frequently Asked Questions

• Performance Max campaigns serve to complement existing search campaigns and won't impact your keyword targeting.
• If a search query matches a search keyword associated with your account, then your search campaign ads will take priority over your Performance Max ads during ad delivery.
• If a search query doesn't match a search keyword associated with your account, then the ad with the highest relevance and performance will display during ad delivery.

No, Performance Max campaigns serve across the search and audience network. Multi-channel management is only available with smart campaigns.

Performance max campaigns should go live up to ten days after you set them up. The average learning period upon making optimizations and adding new assets should be one to two weeks. If you experience longer periods, escalate to your Microsoft Account team or contact support as soon as possible.

Not at this time.

There is support for third-party tool providers such as Skai and Adobe, and we're working with additional partners on support. This is coming soon.

You don't need to create and manage keyword lists for Performance Max campaigns, as they don't use keywords. However, you can choose to add negative keywords at the account level with negative keyword lists to help prevent your ad from appearing in response to certain search queries. For more information about negative keyword lists, see How to add keywords that won't trigger my ads (negative keywords).

Yes, you can do so by going to the Campaigns page and selecting the checkbox next to the appropriate smart shopping campaign. Then, select Edit > Upgrade to Performance Max. Please note that when you upgrade to a Performance Max campaign, there will be an initial one to two week learning period.

Website exclusions are supported for Performance Max campaigns, except for the following first-party domains:

• msn.com
• outlook.com
• outlook.live.com
• microsoftcasualgames.com
• windows.msn.com
• ntp.msn.com
• zone.msn.com
• superapp.msn.com
• bing.com

Note: This only applies to Performance Max campaigns—these first-party domain exclusions will continue to apply to any other campaigns you have set.

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