Joe Robinson: Bald Guy, Marketer, Self-Improver.

After a string of successful PMax migrations at BFBC, the focus was on how to keep that performance coming. Here were my thoughts on that as of August 2022!

You’ve read the warnings, you’ve clicked the upgrade button (or built new campaigns from scratch), waited for your new Performance Max campaigns to settle into your account, and things are going okay. Losing Smart Shopping has been alright actually, and you’re not about to lose all your customers. So what’s next, do we just spend our careers as expert budget-adjusters?

In this not-remotely-forced metaphor, the sea represents old-school Google Ads optimisation and the plastic bags represent machine learning and automated bids.

Thankfully, not quite. Gone are the days of tweaking bids by 5% and adding negative keywords (although we’re praying that one might come back), but there are plenty of tactics and tricks to get the most out of your PMax campaigns now and in the future.

Wait, you can actually optimise it? I thought it was pretty set-and-forget?

With Performance Max, Google have done the opposite of what we’ve all been expecting and actually added settings back into campaigns compared with what Smart Shopping would let us do. 

Crucially, we’re now very close to feature and setting parity with Facebook Ads (see this insightful article’s second-last paragraph), meaning we can apply the same logic to improving our campaigns too. Of course there are also some Google tricks which still work too, so read on for 4 top tips which will help you keep testing until at least Christmas.

Tip 1: Segment your products (listing groups)

Let’s start off easy. Remember this from Smart Shopping? It was fairly common to build a campaign with all of your products in it, then segment their performance data by brand, product type or price and then give high/low performing product groups their own campaign to manage them more closely. The same applies in PMax! If it ain’t broke 🤷‍♂️

In fact, you’ll probably find PMax’s implementation of this better than the previous version because while Smart Shopping was limited to one ad group (meaning any breaking-out meant a whole new campaign), PMax lets you create a new Asset Group in the same campaign. 

Is a certain brand of shoe outperforming the others? Now you can keep it in the same PMax campaign, in a new Asset Group with its own creative tailored to the brand itself. That way, you can better service the customers buying that brand without spreading your conversion data too thinly across the account.

Tip 2: Experiment with audience signals

“Experiment” is meant fairly literally here; don’t just play with things to see what works. If you actively test new signals across all your campaigns and asset groups, building on what works, you’ll have an even bigger edge over the set-and-forgetters.

Let’s say your store sells surf gear, and you know you have casual customers who are getting started and taking an interest as well as genuine enthusiasts who take long trips just to surf new beaches. They’re going to buy different products from you, but they’ll also have different characteristics and respond to different appeals. By having an asset group per customer type with tailored content and an audience signal targeting the relevant customers, you can give each customer what they want without resorting to complicated account structures.

Even if you don’t have such a broad range of customers, you can spend ages on the basics; experiment with defining audience signals via your top converting keywords, using your customer data or even segmenting that by AOV or customer lifetime value. Throw in combined segments, where you tell Google to find users who fit two or more audience criteria at once, and you’ve got months’ worth of testing to get through.

Tip 3: Use the Insights tab to spot new trends and cater to them

The Insights tab has been around for a while now, but in PMax it’s one of the best places to see the fine details of how your campaign is doing.

To start with, top performing audience segments let you see what else your customers might be buying when they’re interacting with your store. Maybe your customers are all planning trips, or they index especially high for new car purchases. Depending what you find, you can start profiling your customer to inform your work on Tip 2. 

Working with influencers? This info might help you pick who your next ones should be if you’re pushing certain products. For example in one of our campaigns,  knitwear buyers indexed high for being home and decor enthusiasts which was unusual for this store and this could help you find a unique collab to stand out with! 

For this fashion retailer, we could see their customers were also into self-care, with cosmetics and bath & body indexing around 2x.

You can also see some search term insights, which aren’t very granular but should let you at least see whether a campaign is genuinely performing well of if it’s just serving on your brand keywords a lot… More interesting is the breakdown of search term categories which are currently increasing in volume, and you can even filter by the percentage increase you want to see. Take this example from this campaign for accessories, where backpacks are seeing huge upticks in time for back-to-school season:

With data like this, you can find trends you might have otherwise missed, or maybe just get a jump start on your competitors for the obvious ones. Put your best foot forward by structuring your asset groups to serve these trends and watch your results shoot up 👌

Tip 4: Use your traditional campaigns for more detailed testing

As much as we’ve learned to see the positives of Performance Max, we’re under no illusions; it’s not very transparent at all with its performance data, meaning analysis and reporting can be a nightmare.

Sometimes, you might find a way to pre-test something in a more traditional campaign where you can get a concrete result from clearer data, then move onto Performance Max with reasonable confidence or how your tests will turn out.

Maybe this means testing your ad headlines specifically in Search or Display campaigns first where they won’t appear on both channels at once; you might find you’ve got a headline which dominates Search but is crap on display, and another which is the opposite. In a PMax campaign, they might both have looked “just okay” at first (if you could tell at all) and you’d have drawn the wrong conclusion rather than adding them both anyway and letting PMax do its thing.

Looking to test a certain audience segment as a signal? Monitor how it performs on your brand campaign first to get your own idea of how that audience compares to your typical customer and if it’s dreadful, you can save yourself 2-4 weeks of pain in PMax.

We’re always trying to test and verify our assumptions to improve campaigns, so use the tools you’ve got to pre-test and soft-verify where you can.

“That sounds tedious, are you sure I can’t set it and forget it?”

Of course, knock yourself out.

But as soon as any of your competitors start using these tactics, you’ll fall behind.

Performance Max is Google’s latest attempt at its original “give us a credit card and a webpage” plan for Google Ads, but it still needs a lot of guidance from people to make it work. The fact PMax has achieved feature parity with Facebook Ads but not really gone any further speaks volumes; Google and Meta arguably have some of the most website, customer and ad performance data available to them out of anyone on the planet. With all that data, both their attempts at a pre-written ad headline are still genuinely laughable. That’s where we come in, or rather where we stay relevant into the mid 2020s.

A genuine headline Google tried to suggest to me earlier this year. Thanks but no thanks.

I’ve been saying it since 2019, and it’s truer now than ever; lean into the bits they still haven’t worked out how to automate, and give yourself an edge over your competition whether that’s rival stores or a rival agency (provided it’s not BFBC).

As time goes on, this article will hopefully grow more outdated as new settings are added and opportunities emerge. You can always message me for an up-to-date opinion or to get a hand with your own ads!