As an e-commerce brand, maximizing the potential of your performance max campaigns is essential to sell more products and generate greater returns on your ad spend. If you notice declining conversion rates or have difficulty analyzing complex analytics to make data-driven decisions, you likely need to learn more about this platform to improve your results.
Here’s how to optimize performance max campaigns to enhance your advertising efforts and better support your online store.
How to Optimize Performance Max Campaigns for E-Commerce: A Step-by-Step Guide
This guide will walk you through how to optimize performance max campaigns for e-commerce step-by-step.
Create Separate PMax Campaigns for New and Existing Customers
New and existing customers aren’t the same, so your Pmax campaigns shouldn’t be either when trying to target them. New customers aren’t aware of or as familiar with your brand, while current ones are already or have shown loyalty with multiple purchases. That’s why making separate ads for each is crucial for relevancy, as they have different needs and wants.
Pmax has a Customer Lifecycle Goal feature with unique customer acquisition and retention smart bidding modes that allow you to create campaigns for the following audience segments:
- New Customer Value Mode: Bid higher for new customers over existing ones
- High-Value New Customer Mode: Bid higher for higher value new customers over regular new and existing ones
- New Customer Only Mode: Bid for new regular customers only
- Win-Back Mode: Bid higher for lapsed customers over existing loyal ones
- High-Value Win-Back Mode: Bid higher for higher value lapsed customers than regular lapsed ones
To optimize your ad bidding with specific audiences, you must upload your customer data profile lists into the platform. Pmax utilizes AI and automation to learn about your current customers via the data you provide. Even if you’re launching a campaign for new customers, Pmax will show your ads to people with similar purchasing behaviors and demographics to your existing ones for better results.
Whether your goal is to increase customer retention, acquisition, or both, developing separate campaign structures is necessary to bid for the exact audiences you want to reach and reduce wasted ad spend.
Upload Customer Sales & Traffic Data Regularly to Optimize Ad Delivery
As mentioned above, Pmax uses machine learning based on the customer data you upload and heavily relies on it for better campaign results. However, per Pmax best practices, this should be done regularly to optimize ad delivery.
Input customer sales and website traffic data routinely so the platform can better target specific audiences. Doing this allows its capabilities to continuously improve by placing your ads in relevant platforms that people with transactional intent and bottom-funnel behaviors use, like Google Shopping searches and YouTube ad clicks, to increase conversions.
Label Each PMax Campaign for Organized Ad & Audience Management
While this may seem obvious to keep your Pmax ads organized, your dashboard can become overwhelming when running several campaigns simultaneously. Label each campaign in ways your staff can easily follow for streamlined ad and audience management.
Your advertising teams can better leverage Pmax’s audience sorting tools and listing groups to discover which products should be advertised for each campaign and customer group. That way, they can easily analyze previous ad performances and optimize them for better results more efficiently via organized multi-campaign data.
Add Conversion Value Rules to Maximize Your Campaign Budget
In addition to automated ad placement, Pmax optimizes bids to drive more conversions based on your goals and uploaded sales and website traffic data. The Conversion Value Rule feature lets you set specific bidding conditions based on the conversion value of your existing customers, including online shop visits, audience match segments, and store location.
It adjusts your bidding strategy per these conversion value rules to maximize your campaign budget because you’re targeting highly potential customers with similar demographics and online behaviors—reducing wasted ad spend on irrelevant audiences as a result. If improving conversion rates on Google Performance Max is your goal, you can’t afford to miss this step.
Design Unique Assets for the Ad Placement You’re Targeting for Optimal Results
You can organize audience data and ad campaigns efficiently yet still not get optimal results if the visuals aren’t relevant to the people and platforms you want to reach. While Pmax has a range of one to 20 image assets allowed, Google recommends at least four unique images per ad group.
Because Pmax shows your ads on Google’s family platforms, like YouTube’s Home page, sponsored Gmails, and Maps suggestions, creating separate images with varying aspect ratios is crucial to complement your omnichannel campaign visually. You can even repurpose the assets from your other search campaigns, like PPC dynamic display ads, to streamline the process.
Designing specific assets for the platform you’re targeting improves the visual quality of your ads by following their image guidelines. It also helps attract customers, as the first thing they notice in your Pmax campaigns is how your ad looks. If you use a square Google Shopping asset that becomes stretched on YouTube, it can hinder your brand’s perception from a grainy image.
Pmax even has an Asset Report feature that compares the visual performance across individual and group images you used in other campaigns. It has a Performance Label that organizes image assets by Best, Good, and Low based on the most triggered user actions. That way, you can make data-driven creative decisions to optimize your Pmax campaigns visually.
Remember, your Pmax campaign images are meant to convey your product’s unique selling features. Displaying them properly based on the platform you’re advertising on and the people who use it is key.
Make Your Landing Page Design User-Friendly & Consistent with Your Ads to Encourage People to Complete Their Purchase
Don’t lose customers in the final step of their buyer’s journey from a bad landing page design. If users click on your ad but your website makes it harder for them to buy the product due to slow load speed or the landing page looks completely different, it can push them away from poor user experience (UX) or confusion from thinking it’s the wrong site.
Pmax best practices for optimized landing pages include:
- Using the same call-to-action and keywords as your ad text for users to find the offer or discount displayed in your campaign easily
- Designing a consistent look that mirrors your ad’s image assets
- Adding reviews to strengthen product page SEO and social proof
- Creating a mobile-friendly design with balanced white space, visible contact buttons, and quick loading speed for users to shop and navigate your store on any device seamlessly
Having a user-friendly website, including your landing pages, goes hand-in-hand with your Pmax campaigns to encourage people to complete their purchases.
PMax Optimization FAQs:
What’s Automatically Optimized with a Performance Max Campaign?
Pmax automates several campaign optimization features, including:
- Individual and group image asset performance and recommendations per campaign
- Omnichannel budget allocation
- Bidding strategies
- Ad placements
- Audience segment targeting
Can You Run Pmax with Standard Shopping Campaign?
Yes, you can run Pmax with standard Shopping campaigns, even when advertising the same products on the same account. Google recently changed the flexibility to manage these campaigns together, which previously prioritized Pmax over Shopping automatically.
However, it requires a careful strategy to prevent campaign overlapping. Campaigns with the highest Ad Rank will be served to audiences based on several factors, including ad/landing page quality, auction competitors, and search queries.
Keep in mind that PMax’s best practices are for broader audience targeting, while standard Shopping is meant for precise product targeting to maximize dual campaign performance.
How Many Custom Images for Performance Max Campaigns Are Allowed?
Pmax allows up to 20 custom image assets per ad group. You must have at least one image asset to launch a campaign.
What Are Some Tips for Improving Conversion Rates on Google Performance Max?
Improving conversion rates on Google Performance Max must involve sales-focused optimization, including:
- Uploading bottom-funnel custom data routinely
- Setting up ad conversion tracking
- Creating optimized landing page designs
- Designing unique image assets per ad group and platform you’re targeting per campaign
Supercharge Your Online Store’s Sales with Professional PMax Optimization
Now that you know how to optimize performance max campaigns, it’s also important to understand the commitment to do this successfully. From continuous campaign monitoring to custom graphic design and data-driven strategy development, it requires ongoing optimization to maximize results.
Let our Pmax pros handle this for you.
At Reach Marketing Pro, we’re a full-service digital marketing agency with extensive experience in all aspects of Google ads for e-commerce brands. We know how to leverage the complexities of Pmax’s platform to better reach your goals from search to sale.
Our team will provide monthly reports to ensure you maximize your budget and campaign performance with ongoing optimization. We also have in-house graphic designers and copywriters to create your ad’s messaging and custom visuals within your branding guidelines.
Ready to supercharge your Pmax campaign sales?
Learn more about our PMax services, or contact us today!