Performance Max campaigns are the farthest-reaching ads you can have on Google. In a single campaign, you can reach users on Google Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Discover, and Maps.
Advertisers using PMax can leverage many different types of assets that will be adjusted, combined, and reorganized to fit into each of the unique placements across those six channels. With that level of variability, it can be difficult to create compelling ads that fit into each place. Knowing what portion of an ad is going to show where, if you’re not already familiar with these ad placements, can be a challenge.
In this article, I’ll outline which assets from your ad unit can be used in which placements across the Google ecosystem so you’ll be able to create compelling ads that capture attention and convert.
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What does every PMax ad example include?
Remember, PMax ads shift and adapt to multiple placements that work best for your business. Check out the examples of all the possible PMax ad placements below.
But what’s even more interesting is that not only can you reach all of these users in a single campaign, you can reach them in a single ad unit/asset group. Honestly, the ad builder is so large it’s impossible to get all of it in one screenshot, but the image below gives you a little taste of what’s in there.
To give us a working vocabulary, let’s run through the asset types you can leverage in PMax asset group ad units and talk about what they are.
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Brand guidelines
The first portion of the ad unit will be your brand guidelines. This helps you control how your brand will look across many different placements in the Google ecosystem. These controls are pretty self-explanatory.
Your business name is required to run a PMax campaign. The only issue is that it can only be 25 characters long. This can be either the name of the business or your outward-facing brand name, but it needs to stick within that character limit.
Next are your logos. You can add up to five, but again, you need to stick within Google’s guidelines. They require only the square logo, but I encourage you to also upload the landscape version. It just looks so much better in some placements.
Last will be some optional features you can use under the “more options” dropdown. Here, you can input custom color hex codes to ensure Google uses the exact right colors from your brand guidelines. This will come in really helpful for some placements where they regularly add in accent colors to make your ads stand out. There’s also a dropdown to customize the font used in your ads in case you want some control there as well. The list isn’t huge, but it’s nice to have some options to choose from.
Ad level assets
Next come the core ad unit assets. These will be the main foundation of the ad units, and all are featured in most ad units across the other campaign types.
Text components
These are all short snippets of text that will be combined to create the ad units.
- Headlines: Up to 15 headlines, three are required, each with up to 30 characters.
- Long Headlines: Up to five long headlines, one required, with up to 90 characters.
- Description: Up to five descriptions, two required, with up to 90 characters.
Visual components
These visual components will be used only in placements that require them and help you to stand out from the competition.
- Images: Up to 20 images, but the minimum requirement is two (one square image and one landscape image).
- Videos: Up to five videos; zero are required, though. But as you can see, if you don’t provide a video, then Google will automatically create one for you using other assets.
All of these assets will be used and combined in all sorts of different combinations, which we’ll cover later on.
Expanded assets
As a side note, the naming convention in this section is confusing simply because Google insists on using “assets” all over the place. For those of you who have been around a while, you’ll recognize these assets formerly known as ad extensions. For those of you who are new, these are effectively other portions of your ad that are fundamentally different from the regular headlines, descriptions, videos, and images from above.
- Sitelinks: Additional links that operate as landing pages, combined with a short headline of 25 characters and up to two 30-character descriptions.
- Call to action: A short call to action message like “Learn More” or “Contact Us” that will accompany your ad. You can select your preference from a dropdown of provided options or select Automated to let Google choose the one it believes makes the most sense.
- Callouts: Short snippets of text, 25 characters or less, that provide additional context to your ads.
- Structured snippets: A short list of items accompanied by a header category selected from a dropdown.
- Promotions: Show off sales or discounts alongside your ad to create more interest.
- Prices: Highlight prices of specific products or services on your site.
- Locations: Show relevant, physical locations to your target audience based on your Google Business information.
- Calls: Advertisers have the option to add a phone number to help generate calls from ads.
- Lead forms: A customizable form hosted by Google that can collect user data just like a form on your landing page.
- Messages: A feature allowing users to send your company a message through WhatsApp rather than going through a more traditional landing page conversion route.
If you’d like to learn more about any of these specific asset types, you can learn all about them here.
Performance Max ad examples by placement
Now that we have all of the building blocks out of the way, let’s start to look at some PMax ad examples across each of the networks Google hosts, so you’ll have an idea of what your ads could look like.
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Search
More than likely, you’re already familiar with search ads on Google. Performance Max variants of those ads are pretty straightforward and mostly leverage the text components you provide in your asset group.
In the examples below, you can see the headlines and descriptions I’ve provided in all different combinations. Some have shorter versions of the ads, and some are longer.
Others have some of the assets we talked about earlier, and others don’t. They stick only to the text components.
While these ads do function very similarly to Responsive Search Ads, there is one big difference. Performance Max ads do not allow advertisers to pin assets into certain placements. Since these assets are used for all networks on Google, it doesn’t apply to all placements.
So when you’re writing your ads for Performance Max, keep the dynamism of RSAs in mind, but remember you don’t have the option to pin. All of these components can show in just about any combination, so it’s in your best interest to make sure all variants can combine with all other variants and still make a compelling ad.
Display
The display network variants for Performance Max ads have quite a wide range of spaces they can fit in. Because of that, there are lots of different examples we can look at to see how our same components will show up.
On mobile, ads can show with all different combinations of headlines, descriptions, images, and even videos.
Even in this next set, you can see that the colors of the ads are quite a bit different, and they include just one of the headlines in big text with small supporting text or the entirety of the video running with some surrounding text.
When we get to the desktop examples, the ads look pretty similar, but they could show in either the top of the page…
… in between text, or…
… on the right-hand rail.
As you can tell from the previews, these ads are going to show in placements where the user is engaging with a website external to Google. While search ads need to answer a user’s query, display ads need to capture their attention enough to make an impact. Providing assets to PMAX ads that are eye-catching and attention-grabbing will be very useful for the display placements.
YouTube
For each asset group, you can add up to five selected videos. But it’s important to know that all Performance Max ads will have video assets, even if you don’t include your own.
The message below that you’d see in the builder states that if you don’t provide your own videos, Google will make one for you with the image assets you provide. And let me tell you, those videos are…not super pretty. I highly encourage you to use your own compelling videos that follow the regular YouTube video best practices.
Here are a few previews of what the YouTube placements will look like. Some use the image assets (which, yes, are cropped horribly in my examples), but others will use the videos. There are some with headlines and descriptions, others with long headlines.
It’s important to note that some of these variants have the title of the video included as well, so be sure the videos you utilize will combine well with the text and image assets you leverage, or else you may end up with some inconsistent ads.
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Discover
Google Discover is likely one of the more unique placements for Performance Max ads, and if you don’t use the platform, this placement might seem a little mysterious to you.
Google Discover is a personalized content feed that proactively serves content on mobile devices in the Google app. This happens even before the user conducts a search and is based on their previous behaviors.
Using our same set of assets, here are a few looks at how a Performance Max can appear on Discover.
These ads look a bit like a cross between some of the display and YouTube placements. They leverage only the image assets and include headlines and descriptions, but just one of each.
It’s also worth noting that out of the images I have, they only used the landscape and square versions. There’s no preview option that leverages the more mobile-friendly 9×16 format.
This content type promotion on a personal newsfeed should feel a bit like a social ad, and you’ll benefit from keeping social best practices in mind when writing variants that could show in the Discover feed.
Gmail
The last placement for Performance Max is Gmail ads, and these are the only format that has two different views for each placement: one for the closed version and one for when the user opens the email line item.
On mobile, most of the closed versions are just text, but there is an option to have the image included. These also leverage headlines and descriptions, but no long headlines are to be found.
Once those ads are opened, they all have images, but usually just repeat the same ad copy only in a bigger font.
They look pretty similar on desktop devices. Relatively minimal copy in both the open and closed versions, but repeated in each. If anything, the headline disappears in the open version and is replaced by the image and a call-to-action button.
The biggest priority for these ads is still to make sure that all components can work together, but also expect that they might need to stand alone. In the open version on desktop, there’s only the description text left behind to convey your messaging, and although my image has text in it, yours might not.
How to recreate these PMax ad examples
Performance Max ads have many, many iterations of how they can manifest depending on what platform your ads are triggered for. Overall, it’s important to keep the dynamism in mind. Some ad units leverage lots of components and need to make sense in any combination. Others use very few assets and also need to be compelling in just a short portion of text, and maybe an image. Your goal should be to make as many compelling components as possible and assume that they all can show alongside any other asset or by themselves and still be compelling as a whole.
For help bringing these PMax ad examples to life in your account, see how our solutions can maximize your Performance Max strategy.
