Google Ads Tutorials: How to upgrade your Smart Shopping and Local campaigns to Performance Max

Consumer behavior is continuing to change incredibly quickly, as they tap into even more channels before making a purchase. As the next generation of Smart Shopping and Local campaigns, Performance Max builds upon all the features you already know and love with additional reach, goals and insights. To help you capture cross-channel opportunities online and in-store, Performance Max uses the best of Google's automation to unlock additional inventory and formats across YouTube, Display, Search, Discover and more.

Whether you have a Google Merchant Center product feed or local store, Performance Max is the newest way to drive online sales and store visits for your business. Performance Max also makes it easy for omnichannel retailers to manage your online and offline store presence across Google from a single campaign. In this video, we will cover how to upgrade your Smart Shopping and Local campaigns to Performance Max and what to expect after.

First, visit your Google Ads account. Once the self-upgrade tool becomes available to you, you'll be prompted to upgrade via a notification. This notification will appear on your Notifications panel, Recommendations page, and Campaigns page.

If you have both, Smart Shopping and Local Campaigns, you will see a notification to upgrade each type of campaign separately. The upgrade process for both, Smart Shopping and Local campaigns is the same. You'll have two options to upgrade your campaigns to Performance Max: You can bulk upgrade all your campaigns at once, or you can select specific campaigns to upgrade at the same time.

Let's start by walking through the first option: upgrading all your campaigns at once. One way to do this is through the Notifications panel, In the upper right hand corner. Depending on which campaigns you have, your notification might say Upgrade Smart Shopping campaigns or Upgrade Local campaigns, or both.

Clicking on this will open up your Notifications panel. You can then click the blue "Apply" button to easily upgrade all your Smart Shopping or Local campaigns to Performance Max in one go. If you have both, Smart Shoppping and Local campaigns, you will need to upgrade them separately.

Let's go ahead and upgrade all your Smart Shopping campaigns first. You'll be prompted to confirm you'd like to upgrade all your campaigns at once. Click "Apply All" to confirm.

At the bottom of the page, you'll see a confirmation that your campaigns are getting upgraded! You'll be notified when the upgrade process is complete. Another way to upgrade all your campaigns at once is through your Recommendations page.

Here, you'll find a card that recommends you upgrade your campaigns to Performance Max. Since this account has both, Smart Shopping and Local campaigns, there are two cards. Let's click "Apply All" on the first card to upgrade all your Smart Shopping campaigns.

Click "Apply all" again to confirm your choice. And you'll see the same confirmation that your campaigns are getting upgraded! You've now learned how to upgrade all your campaigns at once!

You will be notified when all your campaigns have been fully upgraded, which should typically take less than a day. Now, let's walk through how to select specific campaigns to upgrade together. Selecting the campaigns you'd like to upgrade lets you customize when and how you upgrade your Smart Shopping and Local campaigns.

You can do this on your Recommendations page or Campaigns page. Let's go back to your "Recommendations" page first. On either card recommending the upgrade to Performance Max.

Click the "View" Option. This will take you to more details about Performance Max and the upgrade process, where you can find more resources, such as a Help Center article, or even this video! Notice that you still have the option to upgrade all your campaigns at once by clicking "Apply All" here.

Instead, we'll go ahead and choose specific campaigns to upgrade. Below, you can select the individual campaigns you want to upgrade. Click "Apply" And that's it!

You've now upgraded a subset of campaigns to Performance Max. Now, let's visit your "Campaigns" page, which is another place you can select specific campaigns to upgrade together. Make sure you filter for "Smart Shopping" or "Local campaigns" or both, so it's easier to see the campaigns that can be upgraded to Performance Max.

You can also filter by "Campaign type upgrade status" if you want to see whether an upgrade is available in progress or completed. Next, choose the campaigns you'd like to upgrade. Then, click "Edit" at the top, and click "Upgrade to Performance Max" Confirm your selections by clicking "Apply" Congrats!

You've now learned how to upgrade your Smart Shopping and Local campaigns to Performance Max from your campaigns page! Each eligible and paused campaign will be upgraded to a new independent Performance Max campaign that optimizes to your preexisting online sales or in-store goals. Your existing assets, settings, and budgets will be used to create the new Performance Max campaigns.

To maintain performance, learnings from your campaign are carried over as well. Whichever way you decide to upgrade, you can keep track of progress on your Campaigns page. Your existing Smart Shopping and Local campaigns will continue to run until the upgrade is fully complete, which should take less than a day in most cases.

Here you'll find your newly created Performance Max campaign link to your old Smart Shopping or Local campaign. While the old campaign will now be removed and no longer editable, this linking means you'll still be able to view historical data from your previous campaign. You can click on one of your new Performance Max campaigns to visit its Overview page At the top, you'll see the option to view your previous linked Smart Shopping or Local campaign.

Click on that, and you'll be taken to your old campaigns page. Likewise, you can return by clicking "View Performance Max campaign" You're now ready to hit the ground running with Performance Max! If you want to learn more about Performance Max, including frequently asked questions and best practices, visit our Google Ads Help Center.