How to Optimize Performance Max Campaigns (Step-by-Step Tutorial)

Okay, you've built a performance max campaign and hopefully by now it's generating some conversions, you're making some money, maybe not a profit yet, but at least you've got some money being created or conversions coming in. Now what the heck do you do, right? How do you actually optimize and move the needle on your performance max campaigns like you would on your other campaigns like search or shopping. In this video I'm going to break down all of the optimizations you should be looking at doing to your performance max campaigns step by step. Let's dive in. Okay, let's start with campaign structure. And by the way, I've got this notion doc that I'm going through. This is actually a part of my performance max course which is free. I have that entire course uploaded in like a two hour video on the YouTube channel. So in the description below of this video there will be a link to that. Or we have a free group called PPC Launchpad. That course is in there completely free as well and it's more broken out in modules which is nice and easy to follow along versus one big two hour long YouTube video. So this is free and you can get access to all of that this doc, at least through those videos or if you go into the free group that we have in PPC Launchpad. So start with campaign structure, right? And in the beginning we want to keep it simple and hopefully this is where you're at, right? You, you've, you've built a performance max campaign. You've probably only built one. You've kind of lumped in, I would assume a lot of your products in there. And now you're like, okay, what do I, what do I do from here? Keep it simple. When starting out, you shouldn't, you know, the only reason to segment is for budget or bidding differences campaign settings like different location targeting. So you know, let's say one campaign's targeting the UK and one's targeting the us that's fine to segment that out seasonality if, unless you're like blitzing, you know, some sort of holiday type products like Halloween or Christmas, new product or product categories to test or in some cases something called zombie products. These are products that get zero impression impressions or clicks in your main PMAX campaign. All right, so in the beginning it's all about consolidation and getting conversion volume. I talk about that in the course. So if you is the first time you're hearing that, go watch the full video of the performance max course. But those are, you know, consolidation is key and then reasons to segment you, you may go into this, but what happens when you have done this? You've consolidated, you've got a nice consolidated structure and now you've got data, you've got this volume coming in. What do you do with the structure? What should the structure ultimately lead to? There's many ways of, of looking at that. If you're a big account, it could look something like this over time. You have a best sellers campaign structure, you've got a mid to low performers campaign structure. And then you have a standard shopping campaign that's more of like a catch all. Okay, now usually that's for bigger spenders, lots of volume. In Most cases probably 80% plus where you're not spending an insane amount of money per month. And you have lots and lots of volume. So maybe you got a PMAX campaign, you're getting some volume. But you know, we're not talking thousands of conversions a month right here. Ultimately, what's the best move is you turn your consolid campaign, so forget that it's called bestsellers in this, this image, but you actually turn that first campaign you started with where it's consolidated but now you've got enough volume. You turn that campaign in time basically into a best sellers. And how do you do that? Well, you, you're, you're taking this consolidated, consolidated campaign and you're sculpting it. Now you're trimming fat from it. And by trimming fat and sculpting, what I mean is you're seeing, oh, these product types aren't performing as well, or these brands aren't performing as well, or these products aren't doing anything right. They're getting very little volume at all. You start taking those out of that first campaign that you had, that consolidated campaign and you actually end up, you move most of those into like a standard shopping campaign where now you have a little more granular control over them. You're probably bidding them differently than you are in your performance Max campaign. And you're giving them a shot to rise up. Because inside of performance max, Performance max is really good at figuring out. If you give it a lot of data upfront, it's really good at figuring out like what's going to start working. The problem is it really starts like rabbit holing down those products, product types or brands that do really well. And then it almost, it will still give some volume to the low performers, but not enough. Right. And so what you find is over time it's like, okay, it's really like lasered in on These like high performing categories or brands, but it kind of doesn't do anything for the rest of my skus. Or what you find is it takes, especially if you're like on a troas bid strategy with your campaign, it actually steals from your, your top performers. Why? Because it's like, hey, I need to get a 300% ROAS. Google's like cool. The performance max is like cool. We know we can sell these product categories really well and, and then we can get high roas from that and then we'll start spending money on all the stuff that doesn't do really well to still give them volume. And so now your impression share on your top sellers is actually being diluted from the fact that you out the PMAX campaign and the algorithm still wants to spend money on the mid to low performing stuff. So over time the real optimizations that can be made in a performance max, at least the one what I would consider needle movers is, is what you're doing is sculpting it to basically pull out that low to mid performing products or again brands or product types and then you're maximizing over time the stuff that does really well for you, right? And so for a lot of you watching this video right now, if you just have one PMAX campaign, this is a structure that works wonderfully. You pull out the stuff that doesn't do well. And I'm not talking, by the way, usually individual SKUs in most cases I'm talking product categories or, or brands. It just depends on your business, right? And then it depends on how you look at your business, how you structure the data. But moving those categories or moving those brands over to standard shopping that just do not do anything for you or they do not perform well in your current performance max campaign. So structure is one of the biggest optimizations that you could be making in your campaign. It has nothing to do with settings of the campaigns. It's all about the actual strategic moves you're making with account structure. Okay, this is not my thing. This is a guy named Mike Rhodes. Many of you have probably already heard of Mike Rhodes. He's a bit of an OG in the Google Ads community. He has created a script. Okay, so with performance max campaigns, it's very black box ish. Thankfully, smart guys like Mike came out and created a script. It's free. He has a paid version as well. So I highly recommend, if you like the script, go buy his paid version too. He's got all of this information, information here in this link. So that link Again is inside of the notion doc of the Performance Max course that you get for free. And it's a GitHub link here. Otherwise just Google search Microads PMAX script. You'll find it. But what this script does is it allows you to see where your impressions and ad spin and clicks are coming from inside of your Performance Max campaign. Right? So Performance Max campaign is basically all the inventory Google has lumped into one campaign. And that's good or it can also be bad. And so analyzing this data is kind of hard to do when you're just inside of the Performance Max campaign inside of Google Ads interface. This script allows you to break it down in a very easy way. So in this visual here we can see there's a lot of cost going to search, there's a lot of cost going to display, and there's probably even too much going to video. I tend to like to see my Performance Max campaigns with lots of shopping exposure because then I know it's and usually by the way, once you have like a really high performing Performance max campaign, what you find is usually it's 80% plus shopping exposure. When you see a graph like this, a lot of times where there's a ton going to search tongo into display and very little to shopping. And then even the video which is red, if you see a lot of that, usually when I see that, a lot of times those campaigns are performing really poorly. And this is one of the first things I do is investigate what does micro script kind of show where some costs are going to. And when you see this, usually it's like, all right, there's just a lot of inefficiencies that's happening. Again, black box nature of Performance Max and kind of makes it hard for you to even understand that or see that that has taken place. Thankfully though, Mike Rhodes script, which there's the free version, you can install this in your account. You can actually see where your ad spends going in Performance Max and you can see what the performance is broken out by shopping video display and search. And in those cases, sometimes like this I and I don't have the data pulled up of like the, the performance by placement type. But I can guarantee in this, the screenshot, this was a live screenshot that I took when I built the course that search and display more than likely and video are performing worse than shopping. And in a case like this, if that's where they're at and they're not hitting their goals, I more than likely would be utilizing or moving to a feed Only asset group if, because this would be a full asset build if you're getting all those placements. So it allows you to analyze the data and then make strategic moves and optimizations within your account. So highly, highly recommend having the Mike Rhodes Performance Max script installed or implemented in your account so you can get this data to help you make decisions optimization decisions within your Performance Max campaigns. Okay, the Insights tab, this is where the gold is. So inside your Insights tab you've got performance data that you can look at. Like I'm in a real account right here. Right, but so you can go through all of this. You've got performance highlights, insights, auction insights stuff that you can look at. So this is all competitor stuff. Right. But you get this search term insights and the search term insights is pretty key. Google now tells you it's a bit useless data in my opinion, but they tell you now source of like URL creative assets and more. This is basically the source of what caused these search categories to fire for you. But this allows you to see like, hey, what search categories is Performance Max performing well in? Right? And by the way, this could be for the shopping ad piece or the search ad piece if you're running a full asset group. So here I can actually look at like, okay, sectional couch is a search category. Then you can actually go in further so view detailed reports. You can dive further into these search terms within the Insights. Okay, so why is this important? What can you do with this? Well, you can now see what's converting really high as a category for you for your Performance Max campaigns and then start building off of that. Right. This gives you some data back into what's our search exposure on some of these search terms. So like sectional couch is, this is a category. But what I would start doing is breaking this down further and you can download this data. By the way, it's horrendously slow, but you can do it. My conspiracy is it's slow on purpose because Google doesn't want you to go this deep into the weeds on your Performance Max stuff. But you can start analyzing this. You can start finding terms that do well within Performance Max then go build that out in standard search campaigns. I can't tell you how many accounts or consultations I do and it's like they only rely on Performance Max that I make so much money for our clients. Not always, but for most clients we still make a lot of money from search campaigns. It's just there's a lot of effort that has to go into it. So how we use performance Max is, yeah, we have our strategies for it and if hopefully it's performing well, great. But we don't just sit back and let it do its thing. We actually start analyzing some of the insights that are coming from it and we help use that as building blocks for specifically our search campaign efforts. Right. Because I want to control more of that if I can. And so there's still a huge play for search ads. Not always. If you're a small spender, a lot of times you kind of really do have to just focus on shopping ads. But if you start spending quite a bit, you know you're spending 30, 40, 50k per month, there's a lot of money to be made on the search side. In fact, if you're at that level of spend 20, 30, 40, 50k per month as an E commerce business, I start trying to set goals. Not saying you'll hit this, but I always try to set a goal. Can we start making 20% plus of our revenue from search ads now? Search ads a lot of times are going to have higher CPC may not be able to hit your specific goals, but there's a lot of, there's a lot of opportunity there that I see people miss out on and literally just take insights that you're getting from your Performance Max campaigns that you're running and use those as building blocks to continue to expand your reach within your search campaign efforts. Okay, now it's the actual assets themselves. So if you're running a full asset group build like I'm showing here, you can go into the View Details piece right here. So I'm going to click View Details. This is now going to bring up your assets, right? So these are your images that are being used, your headlines, your descriptions, your ad asset extensions that you have. And in here you can actually get these performance labels as long as you have enough volume on it. But if, if you have a performance max campaign that's working, you should have enough volume to be able to get these performance labels. But these labels will be in here. They do mark them like, or Google does in regards to performance. You can actually even see conversion data now on some of this. So you can add these conversion columns here and here. What I recommend is like, all right, start going through anything that's tagged low. Go look into those low performing assets and start removing them and changing them out. So for this case, these images are tagged low. I should now be replacing these square images with some new ad assets. So new square images to test. These are low performing, at least inside of this Specific asset group so you can go in, review your assets. A lot of people just build an asset group, throw a bunch of assets at it or like headlines, descriptions and images and then they just call it a day and they never look back at it. Ultimately you want to keep feeding this fresh data and how you keep fresh data in or at least the best route to do that is just take out the low performing assets and give it new assets to test. Okay, your product feed. Your product feed has a lot to do with the performance you're going to get from the shopping ad side of things. So the better your feed, the better results you can get. I have an entire video on how to optimize Google shopping feeds. This also has like a cheat sheet here in regards to the biggest needle movers when it comes to optimizing your feed. And so I'm not going to go into too much detail there, but this is a massive optimization that can be made that really will influence your Performance Max campaign performance. And it has nothing to do again with a setting inside of the campaign. It has everything to do with like what you're feeding it. And that's the actual product feed of your shopping ads. Okay, so if you're at a Performance Max campaign and you go into the actual campaign settings, one setting I always look for because Performance Max is notorious. It's gotten better, but it's notorious for overreaching its targeting. But like here we're targeting the US what you want to make sure is this location options. You want to go down and put presence. So you do not want presence or interest, you just want presence. Why? I just want people in the United States. This is allowing Google to say, well hey, these people showed interest in the United States Again in the beginning it was pretty bad. Now it seems fine when I've seen people leave this on, on accident, but keep the, keep it to presence just to make sure. Because what can happen is like you start seeing why are we getting ad clicks from other countries? It's usually due to this right here. And I've seen some pretty terrible cases. Very rare today. It's been improved. But when Performance Max campaigns first launched and this was on, I, you know, I saw, I saw campaigns get riddled with like clicks from especially like they were targeting the US and they're getting clicks from like all over. So you want to make sure, just have this set up. That way you don't have to worry about all these outside of your targeted location clicks coming in. And then there, you know, you have to go exclude Those locations individually is what a lot of people do. Just have this on to make sure you don't have to worry about that from the beginning. Okay, we're still in campaign settings there. If you go down, there's something called optimize asset performance. This is huge. So there's two sections here, one called text, one called video. So with text, if you have these turned on, you're allowing Google to actually use text from your website, landing page ads and provided assets to create customized ad copy for you. This literally allows Google to create ad copy automatically. So I usually have that turned off. If you have that turned off, just know final URL expansion will be turned off as well. Final URL expansion, if you're running a full asset group is nice to have because it now really operates like a dynamic search ad campaign as well. And what it does is it goes beyond what URL you give it. So I'm going to give you an example. So in this campaign, in this asset group, right now I'm targeting just home reserve.com, right? If I have final URL expansion turned off, which I do in this case, then Google won't go beyond. If it shows a search ad, it's going to go to the homepage. If it's a product ad, it still goes to the product page because they're clicking the actual product itself through. And that's all set up through your feed. Right? Which is why again, the feed optimization piece is key. But if it's a text ad that's being shown within performance max, then in my case, because final URL is turned off, it's just going to go to that URL. Now if you turn it on, it's going to operate like dynamic search will and basically it will determine based off of the search term what page to send that person. So if someone typed in, in this case, this is a furniture business, so if someone typed in, you know, red sectional sofa, Google, if. And this is a text ad, Google, Google actually may send them. If I have final URL expansion on, they may send them to like a red sectional sofa category page or something versus just the homepage. So if you have it turned on, which it's fine in many cases, in some cases I turn it off. Like in this case I have it turned off for, for various reasons. But if you have it turned on, you want to make sure you exclude URLs that you would not want Google to send traffic to. Because I have found through audits, performance max campaigns with final URL turned on. And it's like sending a bunch of traffic to blog posts. So it's like super mid funnel, top of funnel traffic. Now there can be plays for that, but most of the time that's not what you want out of your Performance Max campaign. So in those cases, make sure you use the excluded URLs feature and go exclude those URLs. Then there's this video piece. So if you are using videos, which if you're not, Google will automatically create those for you. So be careful. But they have this enhancement piece, right? This allow Google's to enhance your uploaded video by creating additional vertical and square versions. This is something you can turn on or off in most cases. I just, I, if I am using video then I just will have this on. Now going back to this, if you allow Google to create okay assets for you, you have to be very cautious because if you go into this view detail section like we did earlier, you see this source column, you'll, you see how it says advertiser. Well, if you allow Google to auto create assets for you with that feature turned on, you must make sure you're checking this all the time. Because what can happen is Google will auto create stuff in there. Mainly it's going to be like headlines, but they'll auto create videos too, like YouTube videos and usually they're hot garbage. So you got to be really careful. You want to make sure though that you're reviewing that because if you don't like the copy, and I've seen some really bad copy created before, then you're gonna wanna turn that off. And you can do that by actually editing some of the stuff that Google creates. But keep an eye out on that. I've done a lot of audits and consultations where people had no idea that even existed. So just make sure you're checking the asset report here within your asset groups and then make sure you check if any are being created by Google, especially if you have the optimized asset performance text P here turned on and enabled in your Performance Max campaign. Real quick. Now a lot of this will be blurred out because it shares way too much information. But this is one you can start seeing automatically created. This is what it will look like. And again you just got to be really cautious of what Google's automatically creating, especially these YouTube videos. Now I can't necessarily show you these videos because this would give you too much like information, but on who the client is. Well, here I'm gonna have it and then we'll have it blurred out. So I'll see If I can blur out like the logos and some of the names. This is for a company that sells John Deere parts, basically. But that's the YouTube video Google's showing. That is hot, hot garbage, right? Looks like a PowerPoint sort of presentation from the early 2000s. So these are automatically created. Be careful with that. And so check this and you'll get the source column and it'll show you that. So in these cases where you don't want these automatically created ones, you go in and you just hit remove. So make sure you're checking that. Okay. Negative keywords. By the way, when I first created the performance max course that I have, negative keyword addition wasn't even an option. You had to like contact Google support. It was horrendous. Now you can add negative keywords to Performance max campaigns just like you can for search campaigns. So this is fairly new. There used to be, or there was stated by Google there would be a limit of 100. That is not the case anymore. You can add negative keywords just like you can for search campaigns. So you have full control now of negative negative keywords. With Performance Max campaigns, all you do is you go to audience keywords and content, you go to the keyword section, and then boom, you just go to this negative keyword tab there. And then there you go, you can add negative keywords just like you would for search campaigns. Okay, Brand exclusion. This is inside your campaign settings here as well. Here you can actually to make sure your brand is not showing in performance max. Because performance max, you don't have brands excluded through negative keywords or through brand exclusions. Performance max does a really good job of showing a lot of brand and brand being your own company name. And that can skew the data. So it looks like, wow, my performance max campaign from an aggregate is doing really well. And then you dive into the data. It's like, actually that seems to be a lot of brand revenue that, that it's generated. So how much new customer acquisition is it actually generating for us? Right? So to prevent that from happening, you can add brand exclusions. And a brand exclusion is nothing more than you add a list, a brand list. So in this case for this company, it's called home Reserve. Google has indexed keywords for Home Reserve's brand, so just understands what Home Reserve brands are. And now we've applied home reserve as a brand exclusion to their performance max campaign. And now we get zero home reserve searches being shown. And you can check this through that Insights tab that I showed you earlier in this Video and we should have all brand searches now hopefully being shown in our other campaigns. Search campaigns, regular shopping and not performance Max. So now I know, hey brand is not skewing any of any of the data inside of this performance Max campaign. If you don't have your brand shown because you can just add new brand and then you enter a brand. So like let's say it's. I'm just going to make one up, right? Tom's computers. No brands found. What you can do is hit request a brand. Google then will actually. You just go through a process. Google will then actually create that for you. It can take some time. But if you are already like maybe a previous advertiser with Google and you've got lots of data, they probably already have you indexed. So like if I'm just going to use Nike as an example, boom, Nike's in here. And then I just add this is my Nike brand exclusion list. Boom, hit save, done. And now I can exclude my brand from performance Max campaign without needing to add all the different variations of keywords as negative keywords. I can just do it in one efficient setting by utilizing the brand exclusion list. I saved this for last because I sometimes it's a tough one. It gets a little complex. But there is, in the campaign settings, it's customer acquisition. There is a piece called Bid higher for new customers. Now I do not recommend this in most cases, but if you're going to use it, here's what I would do. So you go to set up, all right. And they have, they've actually overcomplicated this even further than what it used to be. But you have an option here. You can add an incremental conversion value for new customers. So if someone came in and bought $100 product from you and you put a 100 in here, this would add actually increase the value of it. So they give us an example over here. Existing customer $551. So that's what the conversion value would be inside of your Google Ads account. Then here, new customers651. It added $100 extra to the value, right? I do not like this for, for several reasons. A lot of people forget they have it and then they're looking at their campaigns and they're like, yeah, this is doing really well. I've done audits and consultations where I'm like, guys, do you realize this is running? And do you realize you have this like huge value increase on new customers? And they're like, oh no, we didn't know. Or they Forgot about it. So I'm like, yeah, that hundred thousand dollars in conversion value that the campaign's reporting from last month is not accurate. And that's why it's not lining up with your backend numbers. It's because you've inflated all of the conversion values for what Google determines as new customers. So here's my workaround on it. You just put, if you want to use this, you just put a value of one. Okay, now you're only inflating new customer transact conversions from your Performance Max campaign by one. So ultimately it's not skewing the numbers that much. However, you're still signaling to Google that you value new customers more and you want the algorithm to focus on new customers. I believe Performance Max ultimately does what it wants to do in regards to just trying to hit like your goals and stuff. So I don't know how much this actually influences the, the algorithm algorithms itself, but do not. Just don't go crazy. Don't go in there and inflate conversion values by huge numbers. I've seen so many people do it and a lot of times they forget they even did it and then their numbers don't make any sense and then it's hard to even optimize around now and then to go backwards is like a huge pain. So if you do it, just put a value of one and then that's it. Okay, there you go. You now have enough to optimize your Performance Max campaigns. I hope you got great value from this. Again, I have the entire course on Performance Max campaigns for E commerce, specifically that video on YouTube. It's like two hours long. That will be in the description below. Or I have the course in our free school group. There'll be a link to get the Performance Max course in the description below as well. So if you want to go get it like in modules where it's broken out and very, very easy to follow so you don't have to go through a two hour YouTube video. That's all there. You'll also get access then to this notion doc that I was looking at throughout this video. So if you want that notion doc that will be a part of the Performance Max course itself. Again, totally free. By the way, if you run Google Ads and you want more access to me and you want to ask me questions and you want more course material, we have a group called PPC Copilot. I will have the link to that group in the description below. That is a paid group. It's super cheap for. For the value that I'm giving there. I'm actually doing like video reviews for people on their accounts when they have questions and again, lots of course material. So if you want to upgrade your Google Ads knowledge, you're running accounts and you just want more direct access to me, you can get that through PPC Copilot. Again link to that group in the description below. If not, you don't want any of any of that. That's cool too. I'll see you on the next video. Hopefully than.