to Maximize Your Ecommerce Campaigns with Performance Max //

Google’s launch Performance Max is forcing search marketers to rethink their Google Ads strategy. This campaign type has replaced Smart Shopping.

Performance Max offers a unified buying solution to all Google placements. It displays ads across YouTube and Display, Search, Discover Maps, Maps, Googlemail, and Search.

PMax excels at full-funnel product advertising, especially for products that have a lot data.

PPC managers need to consider the possibility of higher costs for non-converting products than standard Shopping campaigns.

A cost share analysis that we did in August 2022 revealed a 33% cost share for non-converting products in PMax campaigns, compared to 23% in Standard Shopping campaigns.

It is important to pay close attention to campaign setup in order to overcome the limitations of PMax. Campaign segmentation is only possible with the right data.

PMax is a departure from traditional bidding

PMax’s only option for steering is to adjust the budget and change campaign-level ROAS goals. This means inventory with specific ROAS targets must be properly managed and set up separately in PMax campaigns.

You will be able to set up three campaigns if you use a margin-specific ROAS strategy (e.g. ROAS goal 10 for low-margin product, ROAS goals 7 for mid-margin product, and ROAS Goal 5 for high-margin product).

There are other options for clustering campaigns:

• Performance data (ROAS for the last 30 Days)
• Inventory parameters (stock levels and new items, promotions, etc.)
• Competitive insights (price competitivness, number competitors)
• Basket insights (order openers and items often bought together)

Be sure to reflect your business goals when choosing data for your campaign structure.

You may need to have more options for steering certain products. If so, consider trying a hybrid approach that includes one or more PMax campaigns and Standard Shopping campaigns.

Check that each campaign covers only one product.

You have many options with asset groups

A clear structure should be followed for asset group setup, such as a webshop navigation.

If you’re a fashion retailer with only a few categories you might consider splitting them into gender and kids to make your message more specific. You can only use 100 asset groups in a campaign.

Use expressive creatives that represent your asset group to grab the users’ attention. Check for seasonal changes and relevance when assessing assets.

Uploads of winter items should be replaced with summer photos that show t-shirts or shorts. You can also adapt the text assets to make it more fitting.

Audience signals are one of the key features in asset groups. You can enrich them to provide additional information for the algorithm.

You can add relevant terms to your custom segments by simply copying and pasting related product types from the shopping feed attributes. The more information you provide about the terms and conditions, the better.

Separation of brand traffic

You can exclude the landing page URL of the webshop from your PMax campaigns if you wish to retain brand traffic.

This will decrease your chances of being found for brand searches and, naturally, it will shift traffic to your search campaign brand campaigns.

Negative keywords can also be added to PMax campaigns. This is unfortunately not possible via the Google Ads interface. It must be requested directly from Google.

Test opportunities to find the best setup

When you start with PMax, it is worth considering the possibility of running a hybrid (PMax or Standard Shopping). This allows you to use the full-funnel advertising approach offered by PMax as well as the reporting and steering capabilities of Standard Shopping.

Another way to test is to connect the feed and create a shopping-only PMax Campaign. This approach may result in an error message when creating new campaigns.

First, create and save an “normal” asset group. This will contain all assets. After that, you will be able create a shopping-only group. Google does not recommend this approach. Google does not recommend this method. However, it is possible to split search and shopping traffic.

PMax is an intransparent and new campaign type. It will take more time to find the best setup.

Performance Max: Maximize your Ecommerce Campaigns

Here is the entire video of my SMX Next presentation.

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