The Ultimate Guide: Boost Your E-commerce Sales by 10x with Google’s Performance Max

Well, this is a type of campaign that lets you centralize your Google Ads inventory. This enables you to reach your audience even when you’re strapped for the advertising budget.

So how can you set up your Pmax campaigns? Here are a few ideas to get you going:

1. Social Style

Do you have a bit more room to work with in terms of your budget? This is a great strategy if that’s the case. It lays focus on drafting customer lists, collecting first-party data, and generally creating strong audience signals. From here, you can then draft creative assets accordingly.

2. Smart Shopping Technique

In this case, you turn off all creative assets and instead only use the product field. So this means that you will leave all the asset groups empty, and this means things like:

• Business name
• Logo
• Videos
• Images
• Headlines
• Descriptions

Additionally, you’ll want to exclude the brand name and set your CTA to automatic to reach potential buyers who may not already be familiar with your brand.

3. Full-funnel version

This is basically when you use performance max without restrictions and limitations. In the first two styles, we either focus on one area or restrict others. Here, we unleash the full range of Pmax campaigns, in terms of including data feeds, audience signals, and creating assets.

So many eCommerce performance max campaigns bite the dust. At the end of it all, advertisers are out thousands of bucks with nothing to show for it.

In terms of what contributes to that, here are a few grave Pmax mistakes that can be your undoing:

• Not optimizing product feeds
• Poor campaign structures
• Not capitalizing on shopping campaigns
• Blindingly approving Google’s auto-apply recommendations
• Failing to keep in mind the type of traffic when optimizing asset groups
• Wrongly believing that audience signals and audiences work the same way

What mistakes are you making? You now know what you need to stop doing.

1. DTC e-commerce

Facebook should be your best friend if you’re a direct-to-consumer eCommerce brand. The same goes for Instagram as well. That said, here’s how you should model your Pmax campaigns for DTC e-commerce, according to the traits such brands often possess:

• Keep your SKUs low
• Ensure that you sell closely related products
• Cluster all products in a single brand
• Sell formulated or invented products

This will guide you on how to optimize landing pages, creatives, and your feed. We find that great product imagery is half the battle in this case. Your post-click experience is the other half of the fight if you’re keen to raise sales.

2. Retail e-commerce

Retail e-commerce generally features more brands and SKUs than DTC in comparison. If you have products from multiple brands, the Shopping or Smart Shopping style is ideal. On the other hand, if you’re not selling different brand products but your own line of products (private label), YouTube & Meta can be your go-to. As a result, your performance max campaigns should target this.

Either way, it’s easy to send the wrong traffic to your landing page. So you want to pay great attention to brand exclusions, and bid strategies and to also structure your campaign accordingly.

Are you prepared to elevate your business with Google’s Performance Marketing (PMax)?

Engage with our industry experts to gain valuable insights that can revolutionize your strategies

Conversion means a lot of things depending on your goal. For one, that could be booking a demo. For others, that’s signing up for a newsletter. In e-commerce, the end goal certainly is a sale, right?

But performance max doesn’t always assess conversions as such. It can interpret a lead signup on a form as a conversion, but you will know that this doesn’t mean that the sale is over the line just yet. However, you can train Google to discern which conversions go on to buy. This can help it to send stronger leads your way.

We don’t always have bottomless pockets to fund our ads. This can place some advertisers at a greater disadvantage to bank-rolled PMax campaigns with more extensive historical data.

Truth be told, it’s a bit of a hit-and-miss when you have a low budget. PMax campaigns may not be great in this case, and here’s a great piece of advice to that effect.

“Many times the traffic with performance max is garbage if you’re new or working with a modest budget. But we’ve still got a few quality leads from PMax.“ – Mark Subel, Founder, Two Wheels Marketing LLC.

The bottom line? You may NOT be best served by PMax campaigns if you’re a new business or don’t want to spend big.

If you have the cash to cushion Performance Max’s initial fumbling, there may be a way for you to make it all work. However, you want to go about it very strategically, and here’s what you can do to increase your chances of success:

• Set up a spam protection system
• Configure offline conversion tracking with your CRM

These two will ensure that you eliminate spam traffic and more importantly, give Google the data it needs to know which leads are valuable to your brand.

Performance max campaigns are tricky business. They can ignite your success or be the very thing that stands in its way. Ultimately, performance max campaigns are all about perspective and the needs of your business. It’s crucial that you understand its upsides and shortcomings. Ultimately, just like buying new shoes, the best way to know if it work for you is to test it out. Start small, take it slow, and see if you like what you’re getting. If not, you may need to try something else.