Performance Max: Great reviews after six months of testing

Performance Max campaigns are a topic that is gaining in importance as the end of Smart Shopping campaigns approaches. We've tried this new feature before and also talked about it in Ladislav Vitous' podcast. Now, after another six months of testing, it's time to give you some useful tips and highlight the Performance Max "fuckups" we uncovered.

Performance Max Kills Original Smart Shopping Campaigns

After running Performance Max, the Smart Shopping campaign dies almost immediately - it stops publishing and loses performance.

We've seen this across large and smaller clients with different product segments. In fact, over time, it just confirmed a fact we came across after our first tests.

SOLUTION:

Compare the results achieved by the Smart Shopping campaign alone with the combined results of the two campaigns after running Performance Max. This way you can clearly evaluate its benefits.

If you detect dips, be sure to think about the right strategy and possibly segment your products into several separate Performance Max campaigns.

Performance Max creates a video and doesn't ask for opinions

If you don't give the campaign any video, it will make the uploaded images and text its own. And it'll accompany it with one of the available tunes.

This would be a very cool feature, but it's not (yet). Why?

Visually the video is nice, but the soundscape is awful! But it could be much better in the future. Because at first there were only 3 different tunes in the campaign, but now Google is testing more.

SOLUTIONS:

If you don't have any video from the client and the automatically created one is no good, make your own - for example via YouTube Video Builder.

Google Merchant outage shakes up performance

This is the same as the original Smart Shopping campaign.

Specifically, one of our clients experienced a week-long outage of all products in Google Merchant. And even though we fixed it, Performance Max never recovered from the "shock". Before, it was spending upwards of a thousand crowns a day, now it's barely a thousand. Of course, sales were also down rapidly.

SOLUTION:

To help the campaign, we enabled ROAS, which didn't work. So we proceeded to cancel ROAS altogether and let the campaign re-invest, regardless of return.

Gradually, the spend and with it the conversions increased again. So we were able to set the desired ROAS back and give the campaign boundaries without it collapsing again.

Even Performance Max can't save sloppy lyrics

In addition to replacing Smart Shopping campaigns and automated video, Performance Max also dabbles in search ads. In this case, it behaves similarly to a classic DSA campaign.

That's why you can't stand generic text bolted on across your entire product portfolio. Or you will. If it's okay for you that a person searching for a dog collar sees an ad that says Quality joint nutrition for dogs, large selection of pet food with free shipping.

SOLUTIONS:

Work with individual product categories, brands, etc. Choose one segment and tailor unique text to that segment.

Yes, it's busy. But it definitely makes sense in terms of campaign performance.

Incorrect target URL setting creates bad advertising

We had launched Performance Max with a feed containing only dog food. And what happened?

After typing in the search query Scalibor tick collar, Google threw up an ad with the correct title but an unrelated description from Performance Max. How come Performance Max is only supposed to show up on dog food?

Because of the wrong setting. So make sure you get this option right for your Performance Max campaigns:

Also, did you think that if a campaign has a clearly defined product range and the "Send traffic to the most relevant URLs on your site" option set, it will only serve ads for the selected products and direct them to the most relevant URLs in that category? Then you're as wrong as we are.

If you leave the option with the most relevant URLs checked, Performance Max can show to any search query regardless of its defined segment. As silly as this may seem to you, it's true.

SOLUTION:

Segmenting Performance Max campaigns is definitely a good idea, but to make it work, remember that you always need to select the "Send traffic only to URLs you specify" option.

Although even that's not a 100% guarantee of success. Google Support told us that even with this setting, Performance Max can also serve ads to search queries outside of its defined segment. But they said at least it won't do it as often.

A few recommendations in conclusion

• If you want a Performance Max campaign for a specific category, you'd better double check that you've really only chosen the right products when creating it. Trust me, you wouldn't be the first to mistakenly target the entire range with a campaign.
• Using Pareto's 80/20 rule, split the high-performing and low-performing products into two separate campaigns. Monitor performance and switch products between campaigns if necessary.
• Those who don't want to create a campaign from scratch will appreciate the migration tool to convert the original Smart Shopping campaign to Performance Max. Google has been adding it to accounts gradually since April.
• Use advanced external tools for automated product segmentation. We use PPC Bee, which makes it easy to create campaigns in addition to segmentation.

How do we feel about Performance Max after six months of testing?

We test virtually across our entire portfolio of clients and it is fair to say that in most cases we are satisfied with the results.

Where there are still gaps, we are adding more data, refining the segmentation and fine-tuning the campaign.

But we also have a few clients where Performance Max is not working at all and we are happy to go back to the original Smart Shopping campaigns for now.

And how is Performance Max working for you? Do you see them as a chaotic "black box" or have you come up against them? Drop us a comment. And feel free to add your own tips or "fuckups". We'll be glad to.