Introduction
Your time is valuable, so we’ll get straight to the juicy details. But, for those of you who are just getting started with Performance Max (PMax) campaigns, please see our blog for an overview of what they are and a step-by-step guide on how to create a Performance Max campaign.

7 Optimization Top Tips for Performance Max Shopping Campaigns
The WMM eCommerce specialists have compiled 7 top tips to help you optimize your Performance Max campaigns. Let’s get stuck in:

1. Include Product Reviews
In the competitive Google landscape, it’s important to stand out, grab users’ attention and convert them into customers. Product Reviews help to inform users’ buying decisions by offering them more information about your products, and including them in your campaigns typically leads to a 2.2% higher Conversion Rate.

Within Google Shopping Ads, you can integrate reviews from high-authority, third-party product review platforms, but there are some requirements, including:
✓ You need to have more than 50 reviews
✓ All reviews must be synced (including reviews with low ratings)
✓ Reviews must not violate copyright laws or be offensive or spammy

2. Structure Campaigns Based on Performance (Not Keywords)
We recommend grouping your Performance Max campaigns based on performance rather than keywords or product category themes to achieve higher results. Aligning campaign bid strategies with how different sets of products perform in terms of ROAS/CPA/Profit will enable you to get the most out of Google’s AI machine learning and beat competitors within the auction, rather than using a blanket approach to bid strategies.

Within each tiered campaign, you can continue to use asset groups to segment product types and create relevant ads that are bespoke to your landing pages. This will also help you to achieve high Ad Strength because Performance Max campaigns are all about setting a goal and Google machine learning working towards it as a “North Star”.

3. Leave URL Expansion Turned On
Normally, we recommend that PPC specialists have as much control over campaigns as possible. However, to ensure users are taken to landing pages that are relevant to the ad they have been served, you need to allow Google to find the product URL included in the Google Merchant feed by leaving auto-selected URL expansion turned on.

In addition to this, we suggest that you add URL exclusions from within the Google Ads interface. URL exclusions create rules to ensure that only pages relevant to each Asset Group’s Product Listings are included and exclude non-shoppable pages, such as contact and about pages.

4. Apply Negative Keyword Lists
We recommend that you apply account-level negative keywords to Search and Shopping for your Performance Max campaigns to prevent your ads from being shown for search terms that are not relevant to your product:

Including negative keywords will help you to optimize toward driving conversions from interested customers who are searching for the products that you offer, and away from unwanted searches. You can reach out to a Google rep to help you implement the negative keywords for specific Performance Max campaigns, as they’re currently not accessible within the Google Ads platform. To do this, click the “Help?” button:

Creating an exhaustive list of negative keywords is a time consuming but worthwhile task to help streamline your Performance Max campaigns. Once created and applied, you can check on the campaign performance and continually add negative keywords and phrases to your lists to ensure that your investment isn’t being spent on irrelevant search terms.

5. Product-Focused Image and Video Creative Assets
When using Performance Max campaigns with a feed, the majority of your campaign delivery will be driven by Shopping Ads, where users are actively searching for products. Therefore, the majority of your images and videos should align with the user’s intent and show off your products to the right people.

We tested the theory out and found that the asset groups that contained predominantly product-focused visual creatives outperformed those with a more even split of product and lifestyle creatives in terms of click-through rate (CTR) and conversion rate. Therefore, we recommend a split of around 15 product images and 5 lifestyle images, and 3 product videos and 2 lifestyle videos. However, lifestyle creatives are still important to the success of your Performance Max campaign so make sure you still have an element of lifestyle imagery and video content bespoke to your Asset and Product Listing groups.

6. Use a Script to Gain Insights into Performance Max
As you’re probably aware, there are limited reporting options available for Performance Max campaigns and this sometimes leaves us with questions about what is performing well. But don’t worry, now there is a solution!

We can gain more detailed insights from Performance Max campaigns by using a script. These more detailed insights can then be used within commentary and to improve optimization decision making. This script shared via GitHub, for example, enables you to obtain data on campaign performance and provides a detailed overview of key metrics such as impressions, cost, conversions and conversion value (revenue).

The report provides three key insights:

  • Placements: This is where Google is showing your ads (Shopping, Display, Video or Search/Other).
  • Categories: Similar to search queries, this shows which product categories your ads are displaying for.
  • Product Matrix: The script groups your products into 1-6 categories based on performance.

7. Include First Party Audiences

Performance Max uses Google’s AI and machine learning technology to the highest degree within Google Ads, so the data that you put into the campaign is the key to good results. First party data is some of the richest data available as it’s completely unique to your business. It’s. therefore, the best at informing your campaign goals. Within this recommendation, we’re focusing on the first two audience groups:

  1. Non-converters (which include website visitors, add-to-carts, and initiated checkouts)
  2. Converters (people who have already bought from you)

1. The first step is to include users that have interacted with your business from all channels but have not yet converted (non-converters) – these users have high potential. You can access these, for example, via “abandoned cart” lists. By including this audience type, you can teach Google machine learning who your potential buyers are.

2. The second audience group focuses on people who have already purchased from you (converters) and teaches Google machine learning what your actual customers look like. From here, Google can use your audience list to find audiences that display similar qualities using a plethora of signals, such as search query history, demographic and in-market signal, to name a few. We also recommend including past purchasers from other traffic sources, such as Meta, to further enrich your audience signals.

If you have enough data available, it’s good practice to segment your audience pool to create bespoke audiences that apply to each Asset Group, especially since audience level reporting isn’t available for Performance Max campaigns. For example, a jewelry advertiser could create an audience list of past bracelets purchasers and apply it only to Asset Groups containing bracelet products.

Just like with visitor audiences, past purchaser audiences are high quality audience groups – they have already bought one of your products! Including them will help to improve campaign performance.

Good luck and if you have any questions, please reach out to the WMM specialists here.