Create a Performance Max campaign on Google Shopping

Business benefits

Drive performance and automate your campaigns.

Go to your Google Ads Dashboard > New Campaign > Sales, remove conversion target goals you don’t want, then click Continue and select Performance Max.

Select the merchant center you want to use for the campaign and the country you wish to target. Then enter a campaign name, Performance Max is recommended here, and click Continue.

Enter your campaign budget and bidding option based on your goals.

The most common option for bidding is Conversion Value, however, if your products vary a lot in price, then Conversions might work better for you.

You also have the option to select a ROAS, but it is better to start out with whatever budget you want to spend with no target, which typically creates the best foundation for success.

Enter your campaign settings by choosing a Target Country, selecting All Languages, and a Final URL Expansion.

If you want Performance Max to maximize the search network, which is not Google Shopping but search ads like text ads, then you can use the Final URL Expansion option to either:

  • Send traffic to the most relevant URLs on your site. Remember to exclude URLs you don’t want to send traffic to, for example, Blog or About pages.
  • Only send traffic to the URLs you provided.

You can also adjust any settings you need under the more settings section.

Create asset groups for your campaigns and add assets such as ad text, images, and videos.

Choose your audience signals to target your asset group to specific demographics and interests.

When amending Interests and Detailed Demographics, Affinity Segment is the recommended choice for a Performance Max campaign.

Remove all assets, turn off the URL Expansion, and add product listings if your goal is only Google Shopping ads.

This gives you the benefit of expanding automatically into text ads, video ads, and display ads. It also focuses on the better converting Google Shopping Ads format in Google exclusively.

Exclude your brand terms to maximize campaign performance.

In a Performance Max campaign, you never want to show up for your own branded term. At the initial campaign setup stage, get your own brand terms excluded. This cannot be done manually and must be done by a Google Rep.

You will have other campaigns that run on branded terms as they require a different ROAS. There’s no real marketing value for bidding for your own terms as you’re not driving new customers to your store. It’s just making sure you’re not missing anything.

Consider splitting your campaigns to improve targetting and budget.

Try to split campaigns up into different categories that are going to run on different ROAS levels, with different spend levels. For example, if you sell winter jackets and shorts, they don’t match at all. You want to start spending more with lower ROAS at the beginning of a new season, which can’t be done when they are in the same campaign.

By splitting up campaigns, it allows you to simply set the budget and target more specific products with a more specific ROAS.

Switch to a standard or more advanced setup once you have got the most out of your Performance Max campaigns.

Compare your campaigns and determine what worked and what didn’t, for example, what gave what ROAS, and at what revenue levels.

Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T09:49:54Z