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Although Performance Max replaced Smart Shopping, PMax can also be used outside of e-commerce. For the sake of this guide, however, we are going to focus on optimizing Performance Max for e-commerce ads, which requires an active Google Merchant Center for submitting product feeds.

If you’re hoping to level up your PMax campaigns, keep reading to learn the best practices, tips and tricks for getting optimal performance out of Performance Max.

What Is Performance Max?

Performance Max is a type of Google Ads campaign that utilizes Google’s machine learning to optimize ad placement and bidding strategies. Performance Max is a goal-based campaign type and is the replacement for Smart Shopping campaigns. If you were previously using Smart Shopping campaigns, you’ll know that Google automatically upgraded these campaigns to Performance Max in September.

What does Performance Max Do?

Performance Max campaigns empower advertisers by providing access to all Google Ads inventory through a single campaign. According to Google, on average, users of Performance Max see an 18% increase in conversions while maintaining a similar cost per action.

How To Optimize Performance Max Campaigns

Here are the best ways to optimize your Performance Max campaigns:

1. Optimize asset groups
2. Use as many assets as possible
3. Optimize the asset group audience signals
4. Utilize Exclusions
5. Select the best bidding strategy
6. Utilize ad extensions
7. Use the video builder
8. Consider turning off URL expansion
9. Optimize the Google Merchant Center Feed
10. Utilize feed rules
11. Organize listing groups by product categories

You can learn more about each one below!

1. Optimize Asset Groups

Within Performance Max, you can create multiple asset groups.

As defined by Google, an asset group is a set of creatives that will be used to create an ad depending on the channel it’s being served on. It’s a best practice to organize asset groups like you organize your ad groups, by a common theme. Typically, we recommend creating at least 1 asset group unless you plan on breaking your products out.

For example, if you are a furniture dealer and want to reach your audience with all products with no particular priority, then create one asset group. If you’d like to create special copy for sofas vs sectionals, then create one asset group for sectionals and one for sofas.

2. Use As Many Assets As Possible

Assets consist of simple information about your business and are used by Google to create your ads. This includes headlines, descriptions, links to specific parts of your website, call buttons, location information, and more that are matched together using Google’s machine learning.

Assets are used for dynamic search, display, and video ads to increase traffic to your website. Thus, it is important to include assets that are relevant to your business and ones that you think will bring more targeted traffic.

Google allows businesses to create Performance Max campaigns without creating any asset groups. However, to get the most out of your campaign, we recommend that you use as many assets as possible.

Submitting assets to your Performance Max campaign can be either a manual or automatic process. Manual assets consist of sitelinks, headers, descriptions, etc. Auto-generated assets would be the video ads.

Google can actually pull images, logos, and other information about your products and use the data to create videos for YouTube advertising. Cool, right? Whether auto-generated or manual assets, Google will show your ads when the chances of visitors turning into customers are high.

Since there are no additional costs associated with adding assets, using every possible asset can be beneficial for your business. The only cost that you would incur is when someone clicks on your ad and visits your store.

Hence, use assets to your advantage and capture the attention of not only Shopping tab visitors but also those looking at search and video ads. The longer you let your campaign run, the more Performance Max will learn about your business and the visitors that convert, leading to higher conversion performance in the long run.

However, you still need to give Google time to learn and adjust your Performance Max campaigns as you would for any new campaign.

Within a single asset group, you are able to build out a fully optimized asset, which includes:

• Up to 5 Headlines (30 characters)
• Up to 5 Descriptions (90 characters)
• Up to 5 Long descriptions (90 characters)
• Up to 5 YouTube videos
• Up to 20 Display images
• Up to 1 HTML5 file
• Up to 5 Logos
• 4+ Sitelinks
• 1 CTA (using dropdown menu)

As a best practice, we recommend that you fill out as many of the available assets as possible utilizing the highest-performing corresponding assets (search copy/display images/YouTube videos, etc).

Google will provide you with an “optimization score” as you fill out the available information, and if you can achieve an “excellent” rating, your ad will be set up for success. If your asset group is seeing a “poor” rating, you’ll want to modify the ad until you see “good” or “excellent”.

3. Optimize the Asset Group Audience Signals

In addition to bulking up the headlines & descriptions, you now have the option to edit audience signals, which were not available in Shopping campaigns. Audience signals allow you to add audience suggestions that help Google Ads automation optimize for your selected goals. These signals can include In-Market, Custom, Demographic, and Remarketing audiences to further enhance performance.

For example, if you were a high-end furniture dealer, you might want to select the age range of people that historically buy your products so that Google can help optimize towards this age range. You might also want to select the Demographic option of Household Income in the top 10, as these people might be more likely to purchase a more expensive sofa.

There are also several In-Market audiences that could work great here, such as: Living Room Furniture, Modern Furniture, Sleeper Sofas, and Furniture. Finally, you should consider adding some Remarketing signals of users that have visited the site but have not completed a purchase in the last 90 days, for example. These are just some ideas, but Google has plenty of available options that will help enhance your campaign.

4. Utilize Exclusions

Even though Performance Max does not allow for a ton of control, you can still adjust certain aspects of your campaign. For example, you can exclude certain products, keywords, or even customer segments from showing or seeing your ads.

If you know that certain products are not worth advertising and paying per click, then you can go ahead and exclude those products from the Performance Max campaign and advertise the ones that have a strong margin.

You can also exclude them based on brand, item ID number, category and more. Likewise, you can include only certain brands, items, or categories while excluding everything else within the Google Merchant Center account.

While it’s not possible to bid on keywords or phrases with Performance Max, it is possible to add negative keywords within your campaign. This excludes them from showing to your potential customers.

When considering negative keywords, it helps to understand what phrases or keywords may trigger your ads and lead to clicks that have a low chance of converting. Eliminating such phrases help lower cost per acquisition and consequently leads to a campaign with better ROAS.

5. Select The Best Bidding Strategy

As you already know, Performance Max does not allow advertisers to select keywords and bids for those queries.

Keeping that information in mind, it’s important to know that you have the flexibility to choose conversion goals that matter to your business. Selecting the right conversion goal for the campaign will help Google’s algorithm adjust your bids to achieve the specific conversion goal. Fine-tuning your campaign to your business goals is very simple and will be extremely impactful!

If you are tracking the value per conversion, then setting your return on ad spend (ROAS) will guide Google’s real-time auction bidding to match your ROAS as closely as possible. If every conversion is valued the same for your business, then setting a bidding strategy to “Maximize conversion” is the best option.

Getting the most out of Performance Max’s automated system requires some thinking and planning before its machine learning can be fully utilized.

Knowing details about your business helps make the process simple and when done correctly rewards you with higher conversions, lower CPA, and higher ROAS. The bidding strategy can be selected during campaign creation or afterwards within settings of that campaign. Advertisers are presented with few bidding strategies and your selection will determine auction bids to increase the probability of achieving goals for your business.

6. Utilize Ad Extensions

Ad extensions are a great way to increase your campaign’s reach. Ad extensions include things like callouts, sitelinks, structured snippets, call buttons, and many more. They’re available for both search and display ads and can be used to provide additional information about your business or product offering.

Ad extensions are a simple yet amazing strategy to take up more real estate on the SERP to enhance the visibility of your ads. Performance Max campaigns will mix and match your other assets with your ad extensions assets to create the most effective ad possible. According to Google, advertisers that utilize ad extensions can see an increase in click-through rate of up to 20%. This makes sense considering the additional interactivity ad extensions provide.

For example, if you’re running an ad for “cell phone cases,” you might want to add the sitelink to a particular model smartphone, such as iPhone 14 Pro Max cases, iPhone 14 Pro cases, etc.

Those sitelinks would lead your visitors to a page in your store that shows all the case selections you have for that model iPhone. Rather than make the customer search for what they are looking for and potentially lose them in the process, you make their experience easier by pointing them to the products they want to research.

You can also use sitelinks to include promotional text, such as “Free Shipping.” “Holiday Sale,” etc. How you use sitelinks is up to your imagination and when used properly can play a tremendous role in increasing traffic to your store.

7. Use The Video Builder

During the process of creating a Performance Max campaign, you may find a Video Builder tool. We have noticed that very few online stores use the Video Builder.

However, this element is an amazing and easy-to-use tool for anyone looking to expand the channels to reach audiences that may be interested in your products. Google will use its technology to create video ads in seconds. All you need to choose is a template and a few images for the video to get started.

The benefit of using video ads is cost per clicks and views are much lower than Search or Shopping campaigns. This means that campaigns using the Video Builder will be able to reach a much wider audience with smaller incremental budget increases.

It is important to note that conversion rates from video ads are typically lower than Shopping campaigns, but videos have a powerful impact on those who have watched a video ad before seeing product ads. Those exposed to your products’ ads via multiple channels may be easier to convert when they are ready to make the purchase. We recommend using the Video Builder tool since there is no additional cost involved in creating those videos.

8. Consider Turning Off URL Expansion

URL expansion is a great feature available to all advertisers and can be an effective way to increase your conversion rate. URL expansion is another dynamic feature that updates links to a relevant page on your website depending on visitors’ search terms.

However, e-commerce businesses should consider turning this feature off since traffic tends to be highly targeted toward certain products. Depending on the campaign goals and the ability to use other available tools within Google Ads, it is still possible to use final URL expansion.

One issue we’ve seen is Google sending traffic to pages that were not intended to be advertised or have low conversion rates. To avoid this situation, you can implement strategies that will allow you to still use the tool in combination with other features.

For example, if you want to tell Google not to use certain pages or an entire category of your site, then you can use URL exclusion to exclude them from showing up.

It’s also possible to implement similar rules when it comes to certain keywords or phrases. By using a negative keyword list, Google will not show ads for those search terms. However, if the only path to conversion is through a single page, then Google recommends that you consider turning off URL expansion.

9. Optimize The Google Merchant Center Feed

The first part of your feed optimization is checking for errors and warnings within your Google Merchant Center in the diagnostics section. The diagnostics section can be found under the Products section, and will show active, expiring, pending, and disapproved items.

Don’t worry, the campaign will still run with most errors, but those specific products will not be eligible to show on Google. The most common errors we see include mismatched prices (between the product listing & landing page), image errors, or unavailable landing pages. The affected products can easily be found in the diagnostics section with specific instructions on how to fix them.

I recommend checking Google Merchant Center for errors and warnings every time you upload a new version of your feed, especially if it’s a significant change in format or structure. Most of the time, errors and warnings can be resolved by creating feed rules.

10. Utilize Feed Rules

Another tool provided to advertisers by Google is the feed rules that can be created within Google Merchant Center to better optimize product feeds. Feed rules give you the ability to transform your data to match our product data specification requirements.

Feed rules allow the user to update most product attributes (brand, title, color, etc) with a specific “rule”, which can help address warnings and error messages. Feed rules are similar to the if-then function in basic programming: if a certain condition is met for a product, then your rule will be applied to it.

For example, if a major holiday is coming up and you want to add “Holiday Sale” to your product titles but don’t want to modify the product titles on the website, you’ll be able to create a feed rule that essentially adds this phrase to the eligible product titles.

Some of the most popular feed rules include:

• The addition of the brand name into the product title if this attribute is missing
• Adding extra variables to the product titles (ex: sale, savings, holiday sale)
• Removing words or phrases from the product titles or descriptions
• Adding the color, gender, age group, etc into the product title or descriptions

If you’re interested in learning more specific feed rules, as these get a bit technical, you can review those in Google’s article or within this blog by Store Growers.

11. Organize Listing Groups by Product Categories

As defined by Google, listing groups are made up of listings, which currently include both products and collections (groups of products, assets, and rich retail data that represent a category landing page on your website). Listing groups are essentially eligible products that you choose to show within the asset group.

Breaking down your listing groups (product listings) within each asset group will help you better adjust bids and show deeper ROI. Here are a few of the most common options on how to do this:

• Group by product categories. For example, you would break down the products by furniture or hardware or sporting goods as the category.
•  Group products by product type. For example, you would break down the products by furniture product type (sofas, sectionals, loveseats, beds, etc).
• Group products by custom labels (i.e. price points, AOV). For example, you might want to break out products into price buckets above and below $2,000.

There are other options to subdivide the products, but these are the most basic way to segment within the listing group to see very specific ROI and the highest-performing products. The structure you choose depends on your campaign goals and the products you are hoping to sell.

Performance Max FAQs

Should I Use Performance Max on Google Ads?

It’s ideal to use Performance Max when you have specific advertising and conversion goals, such as driving online sales or lead generation. It’s perfect for maximizing campaign performance without being restricted by the channels your ads appear on.

What Channels does performance Max use?

Performance Max can display ads across all of Google’s advertising channels, including Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail, and Maps.

How Long Does It Take For Performance Max to Work?

It can take four to six weeks to see results from Performance Max campaigns.  This depends on your budget and time that you run the campaign.  The learning phase can take longer as it needs to use AI to find the best user and best ad for them on the best platform.

What are the Disadvantages of Performance Max?

Some of the cons of performance max campaigns are that you lose some control over your campaigns, quality of leads may decrease, and it takes longer to see initial results.

Conclusion

We hope these tips will help you optimize your Performance Max campaigns. Remember that while it may take some time to see results, optimizing your campaign can make all the difference in how much money you make from it!

How to Optimize Google Performance Max Campaigns is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

Here are the best ways to optimize your Google Ads campaigns:

1. Review Auction Insights Weekly
2. Bid On Your Brand Name
3. Make Frequent Campaign Check-Ins
4. Use a Few Months of Data to Make Decisions
5. Stay Connected With Your Client

1. Review Auction Insights Weekly

Auction insights data is a great way to quickly get information on your competitors. It not only gives you the specific competitors that have overlapping keywords, but it also provides you with the impression share and overlap rate. Why is this important? Well, if we notice new competitors entering auction insights, this could mean a few things: higher CPCs, a lower impression share, and the need for a keyword, ad copy, and bid strategy review.

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It also gives you the information needed for third-party tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs, so you can see how competitors are changing their PPC strategy. If we can pinpoint which companies are re-entering auction insights, we can make data-driven decisions to stay competitive on the SERP.

2. Bid On Your Brand Name

Although your website should show up in the top organic listing for your brand name, it’s likely there will be at least 1-2 competitors bidding for the top paid positions. This seems to be a fairly common strategy, making it even more important to invest in your brand keywords to dominate the SERP.

In order to ensure your company name shows up above competitors, it’s important to bid on your branded keywords, even if this means creating a brand-specific campaign to keep impression shares in the high 90s. Branded campaigns typically see the lowest cost per clicks and highest conversion rates, which can positively impact overall conversion averages.

3. Make Frequent Campaign Check-Ins

If you check client metrics at least twice a week, you’re more likely to catch sudden changes in competitors, spend, traffic, conversions, and conversion rate. Some questions I tend to ask myself when doing check-ins include:

• How are the conversion metrics trending month over month? Week over week? (see image below)
• Have there been any spikes in spend or bounce rate?
• How has the bidding strategy impacted cost per click?
• Have there been any website changes?

Although some campaign changes need at least a week for the Google algorithms to properly optimize, it’s still good to check on bid strategy or keyword changes frequently to ensure they haven’t caused any drastic performance changes. At the end of the day, the goal is to increase ROI, so we should be proactively monitoring keywords, searched terms, and Google Analytics data each check-in.

4. Use a Few Months of Data to Make Decisions

Since external factors might have significantly impacted metrics, it’s important to look at a larger date range before making keyword optimizations. Keywords that were once performing well might not have the same optimal performance right now.

Before the pandemic, I was generally reviewing keyword data for the last 30-60 days before changing match types or pausing due to minimal conversions. Now I’m taking a more expansive approach by reviewing data as far back as four months to really understand if a conversion drop was solely COVID-related or if there might be another cause. Since we always want to make data-driven decisions, we need to take a deeper look and ask ourselves some additional questions, such as:

1. Has the landing page changed?
2. Do we need to reconfigure conversions?
3. Are there still competitors in auction insights?
4. Does that ad copy reflect the right tone?
5. How does the current quality score compare to February or March?

For example, one of my clients saw conversions drop to zero for a set of keywords once COVID-19 started impacting business in late March/early April. Nonetheless, the keywords were still getting impressions, the ads were still getting clicks, the landing pages hadn’t changed. Additionally, competitors were still present in auction insights. So, how does a conversion drop this large make sense?

In most cases, people were researching a particular product or service but weren’t ready to make a purchase. After reviewing the last few months of keyword data, I decided to leave the highest converting keywords active as I monitored bounce rate, impression share, and auction insights, which saved the account from detrimental results. With various industries and states recently easing up on quarantine guidelines, the conversions began trickling in with an even higher conversion rate than previously seen. The bottom line is that you might need to look at three, four, or even five months of data before removing a keyword that was previously converting. Otherwise, you might miss out on conversion opportunities that could have an even longer-lasting impact on revenue and ROI.

5. Stay Connected With Your Client

One of the most important ways we can help our clients navigate these uncertain times is to reach out and check-in on their revenue goals between strategy calls. If we can understand how leads and revenue are trending on a weekly basis, we can modify the PPC campaigns as needed. Google Ads only shows us a piece of the pie, so we need to be proactive in speaking with the client and taking a deeper look into Google Analytics for any further insights.

Conclusion:

While optimizing your Google Ads campaigns can be challenging, there are numerous ways to stay on top of trends that might be impacting performance. As long as you keep your client’s goals top of mind and check on metrics frequently, you’ll be able to make data-driven decisions to drive a positive ROI.

How do you optimize your Google Ads campaigns? Let me know down in the comments!

5 Ways To Optimize Your Google Ads Campaigns is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

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As my client-base grew, I quickly realized that I needed to shift gears and find a more efficient way to develop these individual strategies while also using readily available tools that would make my job, and life, much easier. I found that the most effective way to plan out a new PPC strategy is to follow the 5 steps I listed below. Are you interested? Keep reading!

1. Do Your Keyword Research

Keyword research is the most important part of the strategy process. Fortunately, there are numerous tools that can help you with this in addition to Google Ads Keyword Planner. My go-to’s are: 

• Ahrefs
• SEMrush
• Keyword Planner
• Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) 

Ahrefs is always the first tool I use. This helps launch my initial list of keywords. The great thing about this tool is that it gives you all terms that are similar to the keyword you are researching and even provides options you might not have considered. It also gives the volume, number of clicks, and cost per click data. It’s a super easy platform to use and gives you everything you need in one view. Here is an example of the Ahrefs findings for “furniture store” keywords. Pretty nifty, right?

SEMrush is similar to Ahrefs in that you can see all traffic, including clicks and cost per click (CPC). If you don’t have access to either of these tools, the next best option is Google Keyword Planner and the SERP. It’s always important to use more than one tool to check traffic and CPC in order to come up with an overall strategy, including a monthly budget.

Keyword Planner looks slightly different than the other tools. You have the option to narrow down by multiple metrics and it might take some adjusting when diving in.

It is always worth a manual check of the SERP for paid results. It’s good to see if there are ads showing up and who your main competitors are. The SERP won’t help you come up with a list of keywords, but it will help you understand which competitors are advertising.

2. Map Out A Strategy 

The easiest way to keep your strategy organized is to map out your ad groups and keywords on a Google Sheet. This keeps everything organized and easy to navigate, especially if you use different tabs. While it’s necessary to have all high intent keywords and low intent keywords mapped out, launching with high intent keywords usually results in more qualified leads, an account with a less aggressive spend, and a simpler strategy. Starting simply will allow you to test and slowly expand to more general and broad keywords if your budget allows.

I’ve found that compiling a large list of keywords and narrowing down by intent gives you several options to keep expanding the campaign once it’s live. Don’t forget to structure your ad groups with relevant and similar keywords only. I’d recommend keeping ad groups small, using no more than 6-8 keywords. This will allow you to write very tailored ad copy and use specific landing pages to keep your quality score high, ensuring that you pay less per click. Once my ad groups are organized, I create example ads and extensions, which gives the client a better idea of the full strategy.

3. Research Your Audience

One thing I’ve learned is to always do the extra research in Google Analytics to find out how I can apply client demographics and audiences into the campaign. Who is their main audience? What are their interests? What location brings in the most traffic? Which device converts the most? Being able to tailor the campaigns with specific demographic, location, or device adjustments can help launch the account with more relevant targeting. You’ll likely adjust after a week or two of data, but informing the client that you’re going the extra mile will show them you’re dedicated to their campaign’s success. Once you compile this information, make sure to add it to your strategy map!

4. Enable Proper Conversion Tracking

It’s crucial to plan and implement proper conversions based on your client’s goals. I’ve found that it’s easiest to ask for these during the onboarding call, which eliminates the back and forth later on. Whether the client’s goals are transactions, leads, form-fills, “contact us” clicks, phone calls, or other website engagements, it’s important to make sure all tracking is tested before launch.

If you’re not too familiar with Google Tag Manager, some additional research will be worthwhile. There is nothing worse than launching a campaign with broken conversions because it results in lost attribution. I highly recommend all tracking be done in Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics because they are the easiest way to track and test properly (and Google agrees!)

5. Share Your Strategy with the Client

After all your research and implementation, you can finally send the strategy plan over for client approval. I always communicate this prior to launch to give the client a more comprehensive look at everything, which definitely helps establish trust. Transparency is crucial to the success of any campaign!

So, what’s the key to a great Google Ads strategy?

While creating new Google Ads strategies can be challenging, there are numerous ways to stay organized and be successful while learning about new industries in the process. As long as you keep your client’s goals top of mind, you can follow a process that works best for you!

What Google Ads strategies do you use? Let me know down in the comments!

5 Steps to Launching a Successful Google Ads Campaign is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.