Mistake 3: Choosing the wrong campaign structure
Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2025 3:32 am
I've seen many Performance Max campaigns with multiple asset groups targeting different audience signals but with the same creative or products. In my experience, this goes against the spirit of how Performance Max works. Instead, we create asset groups based on product or service categories.
Since our targeting is based on audience signals, not lists, there is india mobile database little benefit to segmenting them this way. The lack of asset group-level reporting for Performance Max means it is unclear how useful this is.
If you use different UTM parameters to send multiple traffic sources to your page, you might be able to see data in Google Analytics or offline conversions. However, different audience signals can still target the same cohort. You can't target a fixed audience in Performance Max.
It may seem counterintuitive if you're new to these campaigns, but experience shows that creating asset groups around audience signals only confuses the system.
Mistake 4: Ignoring standard shopping campaigns
Many of my colleagues are unhappy with the lack of control over where Performance Max places your ads, but there is one way to counter that. To set Performance Max to work only as Smart Shopping , you need to do two things:
Remove all creative assets from an asset group.
Turn off URL expansion at the campaign level.
When you do these two things, the campaign will likely spend the main budget on Shopping, with very little spilling over into placements like Search, YouTube, and Display.
On the other hand, if you remove the data feed entirely, your ads will typically not appear on Search and Shopping, as Google focuses more on YouTube, Gmail, Discovery, and Display.
Beyond that and a few account-level exclusions, there's really not much you can do to control placement by campaign.
So when we work with e-commerce clients with larger catalogs, we typically recommend running Performance Max and Shopping campaigns together.
This means you run one segment of products in Shopping - whether by category, sub-brand, or other attributes - and another (such as top items) in Performance Max.
If the client is already active in Shopping and it works, we move some products that are not selling well to Performance Max. We can even do the opposite and move the most successful products there . All we do is test what works to find the path to optimal profitability.
If you are starting with Performance Max and want to test Standard Purchases alongside it, we recommend looking for product subgroups that are not getting:
Since our targeting is based on audience signals, not lists, there is india mobile database little benefit to segmenting them this way. The lack of asset group-level reporting for Performance Max means it is unclear how useful this is.
If you use different UTM parameters to send multiple traffic sources to your page, you might be able to see data in Google Analytics or offline conversions. However, different audience signals can still target the same cohort. You can't target a fixed audience in Performance Max.
It may seem counterintuitive if you're new to these campaigns, but experience shows that creating asset groups around audience signals only confuses the system.
Mistake 4: Ignoring standard shopping campaigns
Many of my colleagues are unhappy with the lack of control over where Performance Max places your ads, but there is one way to counter that. To set Performance Max to work only as Smart Shopping , you need to do two things:
Remove all creative assets from an asset group.
Turn off URL expansion at the campaign level.
When you do these two things, the campaign will likely spend the main budget on Shopping, with very little spilling over into placements like Search, YouTube, and Display.
On the other hand, if you remove the data feed entirely, your ads will typically not appear on Search and Shopping, as Google focuses more on YouTube, Gmail, Discovery, and Display.
Beyond that and a few account-level exclusions, there's really not much you can do to control placement by campaign.
So when we work with e-commerce clients with larger catalogs, we typically recommend running Performance Max and Shopping campaigns together.
This means you run one segment of products in Shopping - whether by category, sub-brand, or other attributes - and another (such as top items) in Performance Max.
If the client is already active in Shopping and it works, we move some products that are not selling well to Performance Max. We can even do the opposite and move the most successful products there . All we do is test what works to find the path to optimal profitability.
If you are starting with Performance Max and want to test Standard Purchases alongside it, we recommend looking for product subgroups that are not getting: