You have created a Google Ads Performance Max Campaign for your business, now what?
Digital advertising is getting more and more competitive and if you use Google Ads, you have to learn how to optimize your campaigns for your business to grow. Google Ads Performance Max Campaigns is a great strategy to increase your online visibility, but only if you do it right. Once you get data and insights from your PMax campaign, you want to improve it through optimization continuously.
In this guide, we’ll show you how to optimize your campaign effectively so you can get better results from PMax. From account and campaign structure management, to bid adjustments, we’ll discuss how can you maximize your PMax campaign performance.
Want to increase your revenue through Google Ads Performance Max?
What Is Performance Max And How Is It Different From Other Campaign Types?
Performance Max is a type of campaign on Google Ads that uses machine learning to advertise your ads through various Google platforms (Search, Display, YouTube, and Discover). It aims to maximize the performance of your advertising campaigns by dynamically adjusting bids, ad placements, and targeting to reach your advertising goals.
Here are some key features of Google Ads Performance Max campaigns and how they differ from other campaign types:
- Cross-Platform Optimization: Performance Max campaigns are designed to run across multiple Google platforms, allowing advertisers to reach audiences across Search, Display, YouTube, and Discover – using a single campaign. This is different from traditional campaign types, which are typically on a single network or ad format.
- Automated Bidding and Targeting: Performance Max campaigns use automated bidding strategies to optimize bids in real-time based on the likelihood of conversion. Similarly, audience targeting is also automated, it uses Google’s machine learning algorithms to reach users who are most likely to take the desired action.
- Dynamic Ad Creative: Performance Max campaigns support various ad formats, including responsive search ads, responsive display ads, and video ads. Ads are dynamically generated and optimized based on user context and behavior, ensuring relevance and engagement across different platforms and placements.
- Simplified Campaign Management: Unlike traditional campaigns that require manual optimization and management across different networks and formats, Performance Max campaigns offer streamlined campaign setup and management. Advertisers can focus on defining their goals and audiences, while Google’s algorithms handle the optimization and delivery of ads.
Although Google Ads Performance Max campaigns take most of the control over your ads, it is still a good campaign to create and test for your ads. If you use the right optimization strategies, PMax will definitely help in scaling your advertising efforts and growing your business.
Optimization Strategies For Google Ads Performance Max Campaign
The idea behind optimization is to improve your results, and before that, you need to evaluate your current PMax campaign performance. You want to check if you are reaching your campaign goals or not. Most Google Ads PMax campaigns may hit below their goals at some point, but you don’t have to wait for it to do something.
There are lots of possibilities as to why your PMax campaign is not working and here are some strategies that you can use for optimization.
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Account & Campaign Structure
Your account and campaign structure have a huge impact on your overall Google Ads performance. Since performance max campaigns also have a big impact on your other existing campaign types (if you have one), you need to consider the interaction.
You might want to consolidate or add more of your asset and product groups. You can read more about Google Ads Performance Max Campaign structure here.
Budget
This is one of the most important levers you can adjust for your campaign. For standard shopping campaigns, it is capped by the search impression share of 100% – if you’re not reaching 100%, you can raise your budget and cost per click. But Performance Max campaigns, it has unlimited inventory (Display, Youtube, etc.) and it will be difficult to see how many impressions are still available for your campaign.
For budget changes, you want to make small increments. For example, a 10%-20% budget increase every 2 days so Google can adjust.
Products & Pricing
You want to make sure that you have attractive products and pricing. Give more options to your customers (shipping cost, fast delivery, payment methods, flexible financing, etc). You also want to make sure that you have a great website that will showcase your products.
If you can add more reviews or testimonials for social proof, then it’s better.
Product Feed
Make sure that all of your products are approved on Google Merchant Center, if they are not approved or have limited status, then they won’t show up all the time or not show up at all on Google platforms. Also, check the product status issues daily so you’ll be able to fix them fast.
Another strategy is to organize your products through custom labels feature from Google Merchant Center, this will help you advertise based on categories. You can read more about custom labels here.
Bid Strategy And Targets
You have to decide which bid strategy you will use – Maximize Conversions or Maximize Conversion Value. If you have lots of products with almost the same prices to advertise, then both bidding strategies will work. But if you have a wide range of product prices, then Max Conversion Value will work best for your campaign. But not one is better than the other, you can always experiment with both strategies and see which one works best.
For bid strategy targets, you can set a target cost per action (CPA) or no target CPA. Whatever value you set, Google will just ignore that CPA if your campaign is just starting. This is because Google’s algorithm wants to get more data as it is still starting.
You also want to be careful with setting unrealistic target CPAs, because this might stop Google from running ads since it is not reaching the target CPA you set. Keep in mind that Google calculates targets on a 30-day time frame, so don’t change your target CPA/ROAS frequently.
Assets
Assets are very important but you’ll not get a lot of insights from Google Ads Performance Max campaigns. This is why you won’t get to adjust or optimize as much for your PMax assets.
Audiences
Audience signal only suggests your targeting – it does not define or limit your target audience. Google will use all audience segments in your account so make sure that you have high-quality audience segments on your account. If you can set your customer match (email lists) then you’ll get a better audience targeting.
Negative Keywords & Placements
Negative keywords will limit the scope of your Google Ads Performance Max campaign since it is serving a huge amount of Google inventory. If you see irrelevant keywords, you might want to exclude them. If you see some keywords that are not really beneficial for your business, then just block those search terms.
You can read more about how to increase conversions using negative keywords here.
Bid Adjustments
Only ad schedule adjustment is available for Google Ads Performance Max campaign, so if your business is not operating during weekends, then you might want to decrease your CPC bid during weekends. This will put more budget on weekdays when you are open and ready to assist your customers.
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Conclusion
Implementing effective optimization strategies is important for maximizing the performance of your Google Ads Performance Max campaign. By following a structured approach that includes a good account and campaign structure, setting your budget, showcasing your product and pricing, optimizing product feed, uploading great assets, selecting the correct audiences, negative keywords, and bid adjustments – you can significantly improve your campaign effectiveness and scale your business.
Keep that Google has a learning period so don’t make a lot of changes in a short period of time. You also need to be patient after applying these optimizations. Make data-driven decisions, and consider your past campaign performances (if you have one), so you can maximize your optimization strategies.
If you still don’t know where to start with optimizing your Google Ads Performance Max campaign, you can set up a free consultation with our experts today!
