Scott Potter
Paid Media Lead

Wizard of paid media and Google Ads. Insists he’s from Derbyshire but sounds like a native of Bolton. Golfist who runs further in a weekend than you walk in a month.

November 8, 2024

Performance Max campaigns are a useful part of the Google Ads landscape that give advertisers the ability to simplify ad efforts across multiple Google platforms, supported by AI. But can the machine learning that powers them be relied upon? 

A crucial element to optimising Performance Max campaigns is understanding and using audience signals effectively. In this blog post, we explore audience signals and how they play a pivotal role in boosting campaign performance.

What is Performance Max?

Performance Max (PMax) has been around since November 2021, enabling advertisers to run ads across all of Google’s inventory – Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, and Discovery – from a single campaign. All your assets are placed in one campaign, from text ads to videos to images and so on. By consolidating all ad placements into one campaign, advertisers reduce the complexity of managing multiple campaigns, minimise manual efforts and decision making, and have their ads shown to potential customers in multiple places.

PMax leverages Google’s AI to optimise ad delivery in real-time, based on the data it collects and analyses. Machine learning and automation help advertisers reach a wide range of potential customers through multiple channels with impressively few prompts. But it does not necessarily guarantee good results from Google. To fully tap into the power of PMax campaigns, it’s important to understand and leverage audience signals. 

Audience Signals in Performance Max

An audience signal is a feature within PMax that allows advertisers to provide hints to Google’s machine learning about the type of audience they want to target in campaigns. While Google’s algorithm will still automate the majority of the campaign optimisation process, audience signals act as a guide to ensure that the machine learning model starts with a clearer understanding of who the most relevant users might be.

By adding audience signals to your PMax campaign, you give Google Ads a “signal boost,” helping its algorithms better understand the people you want to target.

What Are the Different Types of Audience Signals?

Audience signals define your ideal customer based on key data points such as demographics, interests, behaviour patterns, website engagement, and manual list uploads. You can use one or a combination of audience signals.

  • Custom audiences allow advertisers to create an audience based on keywords, URLs, and apps that users are searching for or interacting with. For example, if you’re selling running shoes, you might create a custom audience based on users searching terms related to “best running shoes”. By inputting specific URLs or apps, you can target people who visit related websites or use fitness tracking apps.
  • Demographic signals help define your audience based on criteria such as age, gender, household income or parental status. This ensures your ads are more likely to be shown to people who match your target customer profile. If you were targeting young professionals, setting an age range between 25 – 40 and selecting higher-income brackets would refine your reach.
  • Affinity audiences consist of users who have shown a strong interest in specific topics such as sports, fashion, technology, or travel. By choosing affinity audiences, you can target people who have established long-term interest in topics relevant to your business, making them more likely to engage with your ads.
  • In-market audiences target users who are actively researching or considering purchasing products or services similar to yours. These users are further along the buying journey and more likely to convert. If someone is searching for information about home appliances, they may fall into an in-market audience for kitchen gadgets or home renovation tools.
  • Remarketing audiences consist of users who have already interacted with your website, app, or ads. Audience signals can include people who visited specific pages, abandoned carts, made a purchase or filled in a contact form. This is the most important signal you can give a PMax campaign. By giving PMax the ability to examine previous purchasers, it can leverage AI to find similar users who are much more likely to convert.

The Benefits: How Do Audience Signals Improve Campaign Performance?

Over time, Google collects more information to fine-tune and optimise your campaigns for even better performance – even expanding beyond the original audience signals. However, the system will always use the audience signal as a starting point. This is important to know as the better you define your audience, the more relevant your ads will be. Using audience signals can directly improve the performance of your PMax campaigns in the following ways.

Faster Learning for Machine Learning Models

One of the primary benefits of using audience signals is that it speeds up the machine learning process within PMax. Instead of starting from scratch, Google Ads can use the audience data you provide to focus on refining the audience rather than trying to identify them entirely from raw data. As a result, campaigns reach optimal performance faster, which can lead to lower costs and higher returns early on in the campaign lifecycle.

More Relevant Ad Delivery

Audience signals allow you to hone in on the most relevant users based on behaviour, interests, demographics, and previous interactions with your business. When your ads are shown to a more relevant audience, there’s a higher likelihood of engagement and conversions. 

Improved Conversion Rates

When audience signals are implemented correctly, they help direct your ads to users who are either actively in-market for your products or who have shown an affinity for your industry. Audience signals increase the precision of your campaign targeting, therefore improving the chances of conversions.

More Cost-Efficient Campaigns

Audience signals can significantly improve the cost-efficiency of your campaigns. By reducing wasted ad spend on irrelevant audience, impressions and clicks, you reduce your CPA or ROAS.

Using Search Themes Alongside Audience Signals

While audience signals are powerful on their own, combining them with search themes can further enhance your campaign’s performance. Search themes help PMax understand the intent behind users’ queries, enabling more effective targeting based on keyword intent. When used in tandem with audience signals, search themes can refine ad delivery even further by ensuring your ads are displayed when users are actively searching for terms that align with your product or service.

For instance, if your audience signal indicates that your ideal customers are interested in fitness, adding search themes such as “exercise equipment deals” helps Google’s algorithms better align your ads with users who are currently researching those topics. 

By leveraging both search themes and audience signals, you are essentially guiding Google’s automation to not only target the right audience but also capture their intent at the right time, maximising your campaign’s overall effectiveness.

Maximise Campaigns with Performance Max with Audience Signals

Audience signals give Google the data it needs to deliver your ads to the right people at the right time. Leveraging your own data is crucial to success, with past purchase and lead form data vital to maximising performance. When paired with search themes, audience signals offer even more precision, ensuring that your ads resonate with users actively seeking out products or services like yours. By inputting relevant audience signals and search themes, you should see improved relevance, conversion rates, and overall campaign performance.