If you’re running Google Ads, it’s likely you’ve already tested Performance Max (pMax) and, just as likely, enjoyed mixed results.
That’s because, unfortunately, it’s not a ‘set it and forget it’ feature. You will need to invest considerable effort to achieve good results.
What is Google Ads Performance Max (pMax)?
In theory pMax should work like a dream. You get more data signals and more platforms on which to serve your ads. This can be both blessing and curse.
Google Ads Performance Max is a goal-based campaign type which allows performance advertisers to access all of their Google Ads inventory from a single campaign.
It’s designed to complement your keyword-based search campaigns to help you find more converting customers across all of Google’s channels like YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail and Maps.
The campaigns are empowered by your specific advertising objective, for example, if you have a CPA or ROAS target.
You can also leverage creative assets, audience signals and optional data feeds that you provide.
It’s not quite that simple, however. Here are 16 tips to help you navigate the pMax pitfalls that have seen so many marketers revert to traditional formats.
1. ChatGPT Shopping Feed Audit
If you work in ecommerce you will need to make sure your Google Merchant Centre feed is up to scratch. Ensure you have no missing values and make sure the feed is well optimised to give Google as much information as possible. Correct shipping details is a must.
Audit your feed with the help of the ChatGPT Shopping Feed Auditor.
2. Budget Increase
If you’re spending less than £50 a day, pMax is probably not the campaign format for you. It needs data to build momentum and emerge from its learning period.
One ‘watch out’ is to ensure you only increase the budget by +10% to +20% each time you make a change. If you go beyond this amount Google won’t spend efficiently.
3. Images & Video
If you don’t have bespoke images and videos, you may as well not bother. You might think your business and campaign should predominately be search and shopping, but having the right assets can give Google valuable signals on which users have commercial intent.
Consider creating assets for each campaign theme you have. Create images and videos and text ads which are bespoke to each category if you have a structure where each campaign is split by category. For example if your campaign is promoting garden furniture, create assets with imagery of garden furniture.
You can upload up to 20 images per asset group and up to five videos, so try to aim to upload as many as you can because this will allow Google to test them all and determine which ones drive the best results. You can also see a ‘Performance’ column for each asset, where you can look out for ‘low’ or ‘poor’ and ensure to remove those assets and add new ones, learning from what’s working well in other assets.
Update your assets fairly frequently to reflect any promotions or seasonal events. Having assets that reference the season an be really powerful, for example showing your images in a winter or summer setting. Use AI to generate different image backgrounds based on the seasons. Too many campaigns to do this manually? Pick your top campaign to test this on and then decide if it’s worth the workload to expand this in other campaigns.
Google Merchant Centre offers a feed integration AI tool which can help with this.
4. Tracking
PMAX needs conversion signals to be effective and this includes Enhanced Conversion Tracking and Server Side Tracking. PMAX should be optimising towards the most valuable conversion actions and it should be pulling in the conversion amount for Value Base Bidding.
Make sure your conversion actions are tidy. Only have the core conversion actions (usually Purchase) set as primary.
To increase the amount of data you have available switch the conversion window to 90 days.
5. Final URL Expansion
Go easy with final URL expansion. This feature will replace your Final URL with a more relevant landing page based on the user’s search query and customize a dynamic ad headline that matches your landing page content.
Great in theory but you lose control and the last thing you want is to be landing someone on a blog post page from 2016!
If you have pages you don’t want to send traffic to, you can use URL exclusion to make sure traffic does not go to those pages.
Test enabling URL expansion gradually, because it can result in significant spend increases and takes a couple of weeks to stabilise and start seeing the revenue stabilise with it.
6. Search Themes
Don’t under estimate search themes. You are allowed 25 per asset group and while adding them in (like keywords) may seem boring and monotonous Google reps claim this is the biggest relevancy signal you have at your disposal.
7. Brand v Non Brand
Most boardrooms up and down the country will debate whether to bid on brand or not. In my experience if you don’t bid on your own brand (and competitors do) you will lose 30% of branded traffic.
Decide whether to split brand campaigns out from your generic campaigns to enable you to have slightly more control over brand spend. This becomes tricky if your brand has a lot of variations or misspellings so may not work for everyone.
Consider testing adding your pure brand name as a negative anyway, because the incrementality of pure brand searches can be lower than brand plus product.
8. Negative Keywords
If bidding on brand is making the SEO team go crazy you can add negative keywords to block impressions.
You can add negative keywords at account level and campaign level.
9. Structure
Google Ads pro’s are obsessed with how you structure the campaigns. From my experience I would only suggest splitting out asset groups into their own campaign if you want to have better budget control i.e. red shoes gets more budget than blue shoes.
Campaign consolidation is key if you have a small budget and want to leverage more conversion signals for better results.
Bespoke assets for dedicated landing pages is a must.
10. Zombie Campaigns
Google bid strategies are designed to favour spending on products which have gathered conversion data and which are most likely to drive efficient sales in line with the bid strategy targets. This sounds great in theory, but it means that a lot of your products won’t even be getting advertised because the strategy favours the ones which are already tried and tested. It’s not unusual to have almost all your ad spend being used on just ten percent of your products.
You can use Zombie campaigns to combat this. A Zombie campaign is a campaign which is powered by a Google Ads script which filters in products with low / no clicks. It has its own bid strategy target which enables the campaign to start spending on these products and gathering data on them. Once the products have enough data, they automatically get filtered back into your normal campaigns, where they will then be more likely to gather impressions and clicks because the system now has data on their performance. Here’s an article explaining set-up.
11. Audience Signals
Don’t miss this step. Using audience signals can help you guide machine learning models on the ideal way to optimize your campaign.
What’s something completely unique to your business that can create competitor advantage? Your customer data! Upload lists using Customer Match, such as frequent shoppers, high value customers, loyalty scheme members and any other data flags. Apply them to your PMAX campaigns so your campaigns can use them as data signals for bidding. Ensure you have the correct marketing permissions and update your customer match lists frequently.
You can also make use of Google’s audience data:
- Detailed demographics: Reach user groups based on long-term life facts.
- Life events: Reach user groups when they are in the midst of important life milestones.
- Affinity: Reach user groups based on what they’re passionate about and their habits and interests.
- In-market: Reach user groups based on their recent purchase intent.
12. Sitelinks
It sounds obvious but don’t forget your sitelinks. Bulking out your ad and taking up more real estate is a ‘quick win’ often forgotten about. The more relevant to the asset group the better. Your ads might not be eligible to show in the top positions without sitelinks, because ad extensions actually make up a component of ad rank.
`13. Hold Your Nerve
PMAX results don’t happen overnight. If you can’t afford to wait at least two weeks to see any results it’s probably not for you. You will need to manage your expectations and be persistent if you don’t see immediate results.
14. Bid Strategy & CRM Integration
For lead gen campaigns TCPA makes the most sense but if you have strong CRM integration i.e. HubSpot or Salesforce Marketing Cloud then importing the sales value and switching to value based bidding can help you optimise towards the bigger fish.
ROAS is the obvious bid strategy for ecommerce brands.
If you do change TCPA or ROAS targets only do it 10% to 20% at a time, to avoid tipping your bid strategies into a tail spin.
15. Profit Bidding
Many savvy ecommerce brands are now bidding towards profit.
There are a few approaches to this:
1. For reporting on profit, you can add Cost of goods (cogs) [cost_of_goods_sold] data to your product feed and then use this this attribute when reporting conversions with basket data to get additional reporting on gross profit.
2. Use Soteria, a Google solution that allows you to bid to profit using server side tagging (great if you don’t want to expose profit data in your feed or site)
3. Use high / medium / low or 1-10 as a way to group your products based on their profit buckets in the product feed, and then create campaigns which are split by these labels so you can spend differently or bid differently depending on the profitability grouping of the products in the campaign. For example, you may be happy to accept a lower ROAS for high profit products.
16. Custom Labels
Make use of the four Custom Labels in Google Merchant Centre. This enables you to target different products i.e. having ‘Custom Label 2’ next to every high margin product means you can split these out into their own ‘high margin’ campaign.
Other ideas for using Custom Labels is to add in returns rates, profit labels, labellibg best sellers, labelling products which have high attachment rates and usually result in high AOVs.
Conclusion
PMAX may divide opinion, but for those willing to dig deep, it’s a goldmine. Embrace experimentation, test smart, and don’t be afraid to push your campaigns — and your performance — to the max.
