Blog post
Import your Performance Max campaigns
As you continue to evolve your digital advertising to infuse more automation into your strategies, we’re here to support your needs to help maximize your volume and return on investment (ROI) with minimal effort required. To help meet these needs, Microsoft Advertising has launched a solution within the Google Import tool to simplify duplicating your efforts across platforms when using Google Ad’s Performance Max campaigns.
Leading into the holiday season, we prioritized building the import solution for your Performance Max campaigns that use a Merchant Center. These campaigns will be imported as Smart Shopping Campaigns and Local Inventory Ads.
We’ve also started a pilot solution for importing your other Performance Max campaigns that aren’t using the Merchant Center, starting with an experience that will import these campaigns as Search campaigns and create Dynamic Search Ads (DSA). We’ll continue to progress in these import developments and explore other ad formats later. Stay tuned to our monthly product roundup blogs for more information.
Details and best practices of the Performance Max Import for campaigns using the Merchant Center
Imports may be scheduled daily, weekly, monthly, or now as a one-time option:
Features | Performance Max to Smart Shopping Campaigns import mapping |
Campaign | Campaign settings will be imported as-is from Performance Max campaigns to Smart Shopping Campaigns including campaign name, budget, maximize conversion value bid strategy, location targeting, and merchant store. |
Ad group name | Asset group names will be mapped to ad group names; however, text and image assets won’t be imported. |
Product group | Listing groups from Performance Max campaigns will be mapped as-is to the product groups in Smart Shopping Campaigns/Local Inventory Ad campaigns. Note we’ll be able to import multiple ad groups/product groups for all Performance Max—shopping import customers. |
Product ads | Product ads will be autogenerated, consistent to today’s experience. |
Note: We currently don’t support the import of Maximize conversions bid strategy for Shopping Campaigns.
It’s very important that your imported Performance Max campaigns use Merchant Center before importing. Use the following checklist to set it up:
1. Complete setting up a Merchant Center store within Microsoft.
- The feed must be active. If it’s in draft mode, none of your imported campaigns will serve.
- Submit your product feeds to the Microsoft Merchant Center or you simply import your existing Google Merchant Center feed for each of the targeted markets.
- Update your feed at least every 30 days.
2. Set a realistic target return on ad spend (ROAS) goal. Setting this too high can negatively impact your campaign performance.
3. Make sure that Universal Event Tracking (UET) and conversion tracking are accurately set up.
- Ensure you have a JavaScript UET tag on your website and that it’s working correctly with the UET Tag Helper tool.
- The additional code needed to track variable revenue data is a requirement.
4. If targeting multiple countries, make sure there’s a feed for each market used by the campaigns (country/region of sale setting).
- If you’re enabled for the multi-market feeds pilot, you can use this feature.
5. Activate any paused campaigns that were intentionally imported.
6. Check feed rejections and remedy promptly for formatting issues with the feed and product rejections. You can get help for specific issues here.
Details and best practices of the Performance Max Import for campaigns not using the Merchant Center
Imports may be scheduled for daily, weekly, monthly, or now as a one-time option:
Features | Performance Max to Search campaigns import mapping |
Campaign | Campaign settings will be imported as-is from Performance Max campaigns to Search campaigns including campaign name, budget, location targeting, and merchant store. |
Ad group name | Asset group names will be mapped to dynamic ad group names. We’ll import your text, image, and logo assets in order for us to create ads for you. |
Bid strategy | We support all Performance Max bid strategies except for Maximize conversion value. Don’t worry, your Maximize conversion value bid strategy will be imported as target ROAS with a default value of 150%. |
For more information on the Google Import experience for your Performance Max campaigns: What gets imported from Google Ads (microsoft.com).