Blog post
How PMAX is working for advertisers and new updates
Performance Max (PMAX) has been globally available to all advertisers since earlier this year and is the new marquee campaign type for advertisers to drive more results across our vast Microsoft Advertising Network. It’s also one of the ways advertisers can easily tap into our ever-growing generative AI capabilities and utilize the best of Microsoft’s automation.
In today’s post, we’ll share more about how PMAX is working for advertisers with its multi-format, cross-channel optimization, and share what’s now available in the campaign to help you better manage your PMAX campaign, such as brand exclusions. Let’s dive in:
Why Performance Max for Microsoft Advertising
First off, let’s remind ourselves why PMAX is so valuable to advertisers: nearly 2 in 3 advertisers (64%) say they struggle with having the time and energy to do their job. And in online advertising, combine that scarcity of time with today’s ever-so-complex customer journeys, it can all be incredibly challenging for businesses to manage and hit their goals. That’s why PMAX is here to help advertisers easily create and manage campaigns, optimize ads to reach the right audience at the right time, and drive performance to meet advertising goals—all across the entire Microsoft Advertising Network.
PMAX campaigns are the key to creating the hassle-free, all-in-one advertising experience that so many advertisers need to be able to better manage their time, reach customers where they are, and hit their overall goals on Microsoft Advertising. Advertisers can even easily import them from Google Ads to get them started.
But PMAX has proven to be truly valuable for all advertisers, even those who are already closely managing campaigns with Microsoft Advertising. Here’s how:
How PMAX is driving results for advertisers
Overall, Performance Max has proven to be a powerful, cost-efficient addition to advertisers’ search campaigns: when combined, advertisers are seeing an average 32% decrease in CPA and an average +3x increase in return on ad spend, compared to running search campaigns alone. This is also the case for advertisers already running search and audience ads: implementing PMAX drove a 48% CPA decrease. So not only is PMAX driving more conversions that aren’t captured by existing campaigns, it’s also boosting advertisers’ overall ROI.
Advertisers are seeing an average 32% decrease in CPA and an average +3x increase in return on ad spend.
If we unpack the data even more, we can see more ways of how PMAX is helping advertisers reach more customers with the right message at the right time with our industry-leading AI. First off, PMAX is optimizing ad formats and improving click-through rates (CTRs) in search and Copilot. For example, in data from April to June 2024 with Performance Max campaigns compared to search campaigns, Performance Max increased CTR for multimedia ads and product ads in Copilot by 5% and 25%, respectively, and a 6x increased CTR for dynamic search ads in Bing search.
Performance Max is also helping advertisers find more engaged users across the entire network: in comparison to users that were not exposed to Performance Max-generated ads, retail searchers in the United States were up to 2.6x more likely to visit the landing page and up to 4.2x more likely to make a conversion.
Finally, you can also see how advertisers such as Air France are having great success with PMAX in a recent success story. In the world of the travel industry which has such complex queries and user journeys, PMAX demonstrated how it can understand search intent and match users to the right message at the right time with its AI-powered optimization. PMAX ended up driving 54% more revenue from nonbrand campaigns for Air France. Check out the success story and PDF here.
From the data so far, it’s clear that all advertisers—those who need a hassle-free all-in-one campaign and those already closely managing existing campaigns—should all leverage PMAX to see how it can help drive more results for you.
New controls for PMAX available – brand exclusions and more
We’re on a continual journey to add more capabilities that advertisers are looking for on our Performance Max campaigns, such as controls to help them better manage how they want their PMAX campaign to run. The most notable new capability to share is that brand exclusions for PMAX are now available in pilot for all markets. Brand exclusions lists help you indicate which branded search queries you don’t want your ads to serve on, allowing you greater control over brand image and ad visibility.
Image of the brand exclusion interface.
Brand exclusions on PMAX is available in pilot for Microsoft Advertising online (and will be coming to Microsoft Ads Editor in the coming months). To get enabled for brand exclusions, please reach out to your account manager or contact Support. See more details here: About brand lists (microsoft.com).
We’re also releasing campaign-level auto-generated asset settings (below), as well as the ability to block individual auto-generated text assets, to help advertisers that want to better manage the type of assets that are being created in their PMAX campaigns, and the landing pages to which they send their users.
Image of the campaign-level auto-generated asset settings interface.
Lastly, later this month, we’ll also be releasing search themes and search term insights reporting capabilities for Performance Max to help advertisers further enhance their PMAX campaign effectiveness, so keep an eye out for those rolling out to all advertisers.
We’ll continue to share more updates of what new capabilities come to Performance Max, such as video asset support. Finally, note that support for Performance Max in SA360 is still in development and timelines will be shared here when we know more. If you’re looking for more information, please reach out to your SA360 representative.
Conclusion
We’re excited to see how advertisers are seeing such great success with PMAX and to announce all the new capabilities coming to our platform. If you have feedback, don’t hesitate to reach out via your account manager or the channels below.
Help us improve Microsoft Advertising
Your comments and feedback are integral to shape and improve our product. You can use the Microsoft Advertising Feedback portal, in-product feedback, X, and as always, contact Support.
