In an online presentation today, Google showed us their tool to upgrade your Smart Shopping and Local campaigns to Performance Max. Here’s the URL: https://adsonair.withgoogle.com/events/get-ready-to-upgrade-to-performance-max
You can upgrade your campaigns manually at the start of the upgrade period, or have Google automatically upgrade them for you. The upgrade period starts on April 2022 for Smart Shopping and June 2022 for Local campaigns. You will have until August/September to do this manually. After that, Google will automatically update both campaign types to Performance Max. This should be finished in September 2022.
Basically, the upgrade tool allows you to upgrade all campaigns in bulk or one-by-one with a few clicks. Nothing fancy. Be warned, the Smart Shopping and Local campaign types will cease to exist after September 2022.
Now, here’s a tip for those of you who might be scared by the extinction of Smart Shopping: asset groups are not required if you already have a Merchant Center product feed!
You can simply take your SSC and turn it into a PMax campaign, and if you do not add any additional ad assets like images, videos, headlines, or descriptions, it is still a Smart Shopping campaign — only it is called Performance Max now. This way, you can keep the same performance and don’t have to worry about losing traffic and conversions.
– Nils