Add Audience signals

It is best practice to add customer and other audience data to your Performance Max Campaigns and continually add new people to those lists.

Track conversions

Performance Max Campaigns use conversion tracking of online sales to calculate your RoAS and hence the level of the bid for your products. It is, therefore, vitally important to ensure the conversion tracking is set up correctly.

Don’t run PM and Standard Shopping campaigns for the same products

Google recommends pausing any Shopping or display remarketing campaigns you are running for the products you are advertising with a Performance Max campaign. If they are running simultaneously, these campaigns could interfere with the machine learning that Performance Max Campaigns use to display and optimise your ads.

Optimise your creative assets

Ensure that your Google shopping creative assets comply with Google’s best practice recommendations. Google’s best practice for asset optimisation can be found here: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9784719?hl=en-GB&ref_topic=9739768#zippy=

Optimise your feed

A higher quality feed will enable Google to match your product to customer search better. Improving your content (e.g. adding additional keywords) will also help your products appear for a high volume of searches.

Budget

Ensure that you have set your budget high enough to last throughout the day. If you run of budget before the end of the day, you will miss out on sales.

Set a realistic target ROAS

When you define a target RoAS, your bids will be set to hit your target within your daily budget. If your ROAS is too high, your budget may remain unspent and your overall sales may be lower than expected.

Don’t create too many campaigns

The more data you can provide Google, the better it is able to optimise your PM campaigns. If you set up too many campaigns, each campaign will not get the data it requires to understand your products and bid appropriately.

Create tiered campaigns

Google recommends splitting your overall Google ads account into a small number of campaigns (2-5).  This will help to ensure that all products get an even chance of being shown, as campaign budgets are split amongst several campaigns.

Be patient

Allow time for machine learning to optimise. New campaigns take up to 15 days to get up to learn how your business performs and get up to speed. It will also account for conversion delay.  Some customers will visit a site but not make a purchase for several days afterwards.

Monitor performance

Some products may perform better than others on Performance Max campaigns. Use Google reports to segment and your campaign performance to identify areas for improvement. Segmentation options include:

• Brand
• Product ID
• Custom labels

If a segment is not performing, then this segment can be separated out in a standard shopping campaign, where greater optimisation is available.