Performance Max Drives 4X More Conversions Than Google Display Network

Kidsave is a global organization dedicated to helping older children in foster care find permanent, loving families. When they launched their Virginia Weekend Miracles program, they turned to us to help spread the word. This initiative was designed to connect children with mentors in a fun, supportive environment—but as a brand-new program in Virginia, it needed visibility. Our goal was to build awareness and drive attendance for their launch event, ensuring that more kids had the opportunity to form meaningful, life-changing connections.

To effectively promote Kidsave’s Virginia Weekend Miracles program, we implemented a multi-channel paid media advertising strategy designed to build awareness, drive consideration, and ultimately increase event attendance. Given the program’s newness in Virginia, our goal was to introduce it to the right audience, nurture interest, and encourage action—all while optimizing performance across different campaign types.

To achieve this, we leveraged three Google Ads campaign types, each playing a unique role in the user journey:

• Google Display Network (GDN) for broad awareness

• Demand Gen for cost-efficient traffic and consideration

• Performance Max (PMax) for high-intent engagement and conversions

By strategically integrating these campaign types, we were able to create a full-funnel marketing approach, ensuring that we reached and engaged potential audiences at every stage of their journey.

Google Display Network Campaign

With awareness as our primary goal, we kicked off a three-month campaign to promote the Virginia Weekend Miracles program across the Google Display Network. To reach a highly relevant audience, we leveraged adoption-focused targeting methods, including topics, keywords, and strategic ad placements. Additionally, we tapped into Google’s audience segment of users deemed “in the market” for adoption, ensuring our ads reached those actively researching the adoption process.

While our primary focus was prospecting, we also built remarketing audiences to re-engage visitors from Virginia who had already interacted with the Kidsave website. This allowed us to reinforce awareness among those familiar with the brand and encourage them to take the next step.

To optimize engagement, we tested two creative approaches:

• One featuring imagery of older children in need of mentors

• One highlighting mentors interacting with the children

Demand Gen Campaign

Our Google Display campaign was performing well from an awareness standpoint, but we wanted to explore additional avenues to increase engagement. We decided to launch a Demand Gen Campaign—a campaign type designed to serve ads across the Google Discovery Feed, Gmail, and YouTube, including YouTube Feeds, In-Stream, and Shorts, all within a single campaign.

This campaign allowed us to tap into lookalike targeting, leveraging Google’s AI to find new users who resembled a seed list of engaged prospects.

We carried over our creative tests from the Display campaign while adding two new variables:

• Single-image ads vs. carousel ads to test engagement levels

• Video assets from Kidsave’s YouTube channel to enhance performance, as video content tends to perform well in Demand Gen campaigns

Performance Max

Building awareness was an essential first step, but Kidsave’s ultimate goal was driving attendance at their launch event and increasing engagement with the program. While the Google Display and Demand Gen campaigns successfully raised brand awareness, they weren’t generating a high volume of conversions—measured by sign-ups to learn more about the program.

That’s where Performance Max (PMax) came in. Unlike traditional awareness campaigns, PMax is conversion-focused, serving a mix of text, image, and video assets across Google’s entire ecosystem, including Search, Discovery, and YouTube.

For this campaign, we implemented strategic audience signals to drive conversions:

• In-market and affinity audiences for adoption

• Custom audience segments based on adoption-related keywords

• First-party audiences, including website visitors and previous engagers

We carried over our creative testing from the Display and Demand Gen campaigns to ensure consistency.

PMax is a powerful tool, but the automated nature of this campaign type means that strategic guardrails were essential for optimal performance:

• Negative Keywords: As a Google Premier Partner, we leveraged our dedicated Google Representative to refine campaign settings, including implementing negative keywords to exclude irrelevant traffic (e.g., negating “pet adoption” terms).

• Search Query Monitoring: At the time we launched this campaign, Google did not provide visibility into PMAX search terms, leaving us concerned with keyword relevancy. As a creative solution, we implemented a Google Ads script to monitor search query data. This script allowed us to track the actual search terms triggering our ads, and implement additional negative keywords as needed through our Google Rep, thus ensuring continued optimization and relevancy.

Overall, the account performed strongly, achieving an average cost per click (CPC) of just $0.71 and maintaining a healthy click-through rate (CTR) of 1.68%. The Performance Max Campaign was the overall winner across the three campaign types we tested in that it delivered strong conversion efficiency with a side of awareness. This campaign type can be considered a “best of both worlds” campaign for advertisers who are looking for awareness and conversion all in one place.

That said, each campaign type played a distinct role in the user journey, proving their unique value:

• Google Display Network excelled at generating awareness, driving the highest number of impressions and clicks to the website.

• Demand Gen the most cost-efficient, achieving the lowest CPC and effectively driving traffic. However, ad delivery was limited by policy restrictions, which constrained its overall impression and click volume. If it had run without restrictions, it likely would have generated the most clicks.

• Performance Max was the clear winner in conversions, generating 16 form submissions—accounting for 73% of all conversions during the campaign. It also delivered the strongest CTR, largely due to its strong placements in Google Search results.

Key Takeaways

Our findings confirmed that Performance Max is an excellent solution for clients seeking both awareness and lead generation. Compared to standard display formats, it proved to be more efficient from a cost-per-lead (CPL) perspective, while still maintaining low CPCs and higher click volume than traditional search-only campaigns—thanks to its multi-channel reach across Google’s network.

By leveraging a holistic multi-campaign strategy, we successfully increased awareness, drove consideration, and converted interest into action—helping Kidsave connect more children with potential mentors and families.

If you're curious about what Google’s new, AI-driven campaign types could do for your business, reach out today for a free, custom proposal.