Google Ads has added several updates to Performance Max campaigns. The updates include support in performance planner, scheduled asset groups with automated rules, first-party data segmentation, and up to 15 headlines from only 5 headlines.

The new Performance Planner tool for Performance Max allows you to create plans and understand how you can invest your budgets to maximize ROI. Performance Max in Performance Planner is rolling out now and will become available to all advertisers in the coming weeks, Google said. Also, this allows you to create plans to see forecasts of how your campaign may perform & simulate the impact of changes to factors like budget & targets. The forecasts also take seasonality (e.g. holiday lifts) into account.

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Google said you can forecast how your campaign may perform in the future and simulate what could happen when you adjust elements like your campaign budget and ROAS or CPA targets. This can assess how changes to campaigns could affect key metrics like conversion value. Performance Planner’s forecasts are also adjusted for seasonal events.

You can now schedule asset groups with automated rules. That includes dayparting and pre-scheduling capabilities. Assets can also go through review while paused so they’re ready to go when your sale or event starts, Google said.

Asset group scheduling is another great tool for holiday campaign planning that rolled out earlier this month. Now you can add automated rules to your Performance Max asset groups. These rules allow you to schedule asset groups so that they are paused and enabled, as needed. Use these rules to run ads at specific times of day, or to create and schedule asset groups ahead of time. This is especially helpful to make sure your creative assets are approved in advance, which you can do while an asset group is paused. For example, you could schedule a new set of holiday-themed assets ahead of a special sitewide sale or promotion. Or maybe you’re hosting an in-store special event and want to schedule some assets to help promote it.

You can soon see your first-party data segments added as audience signals in audience insights on the Insights page. To help you gain more insights into your existing customers and website visitors, add your data segments as audience signals* in your Performance Max campaigns. This also speeds up automation’s ability to find you more of these valuable, converting customers. In the coming weeks, your data segments will be added to audience insights in the Insights page. Use these insights to understand the value of your first-party data and see which of your customer lists may be converting best.

Also, now you can add as many as 15 headlines, which is up from 5 headlines, this provides more combination testing. Google said, to further enhance your asset strategy, towards the end of the year, the number of text headlines you can upload to your Performance Max asset groups will be increasing from 5 to 15! By adding more headlines, you can take advantage of machine learning’s ability to create and test even more combinations to find the best-performing variations. This is coming later this year.

Finally, you can use explanations to quickly identify what is driving performance fluctuations, diagnose issues, and view recommendations. You can see this easily in the explanations panels without having to spend hours manually cross-referencing reports and spreadsheets. Explanations are available for all Performance Max campaigns, but there are some new explanations specifically in Performance Max campaigns for online sales with a product feed. For example, you might see explanations that offer analysis on your product status and your top-moving products, listing groups, and product types. A retailer could use these to understand which products saw the biggest changes in performance during the holiday shopping season.

Forum discussion at Twitter.