Google Says Audience Signals Help Jumpstart Performance Max Campaigns But Continue To Inform

The other day, Google Ads Liaison, Ginny Marvin said that audience signals are used to only “jumpstart” your Performance Max campaigns. It turns out that Google Ads may continue to use these signals to inform Google’s systems over the campaign lifecycle.

Let me share the tweets on this and then Greg Finn’s follow up with Google which he published on Search Engine Land.

Kirk Williams asked about audience signals and performance max campaigns, in which Ginny Marvin replied to numerous questions on:

Audience signals indicate what you know about your most valuable customers. 1P data and/or custom segments are used as a starting point to speed up the machine learning’s ability to find similar & new converting customers.

This video might help too: https://t.co/7Pw2pOHnSX

— AdsLiaison (@adsliaison) April 1, 2022

Hard targeting would allow for some prrrretty cool campaign setups. But since it’s just a starting signal, it’s too loose.

— Mike Ryan (@mikeryanretail) April 1, 2022

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So they ask more questions to dig into how these signals influence the Google Ads automation:

Totally

— Mike Ryan (@mikeryanretail) April 1, 2022

Here is where Ginny Marvin said “signals are used to jumpstart only.”

-Yes, signals are used to jumpstart only. They don’t limit ads to those audiences. Aim is to find most conv/conv value.
-Add assets for your high value audiences (can be for multiple specific segments)
-Use audience insights to see top segments to inform assets & landing pages

— AdsLiaison (@adsliaison) April 1, 2022

Then Greg Finn followed up with Google to learn that it is not just to jumpstart. Google, however, added additional context around how audience signals can impact early performance within campaigns. “Including them early in the campaign lifecycle can be useful to help jumpstart performance, but they will also continue to inform our systems over the campaign lifecycle, especially as first-party data, in particular, is updated,” the company said.

Greg Finn wrote “So not only can that audience signal help to jumpstart the campaigns, but will also inform throughout the lifecycle of the campaign. Additionally, these signals can help to inform systems over time. Of course, these audience signals are different than traditional audiences in Google Ads. Performance Max will expand beyond the audience signals provided and by nature there is no way to limit that expansion.”

So keep this all in mind when funneling these signals into your Performance Max campaigns. It can impact you in the jumpstart phase and even well beyond.

Forum discussion at Twitter.