Winning tactics for effective PMax retail campaigns

In today’s highly competitive e-commerce landscape, running effective Performance Max for Retail campaigns is more important than ever to help your ads stand out from the crowd and ensure you are able to maximise your return on ad spend.

In this blog, we’ll explore four key areas that directly influence campaign performance and share strategies to help you set your campaigns up for success.

1. Prepare Your product feed

Before you even begin creating a Performance Max campaign in Google Ads, it’s crucial to ensure your product feed in Google Merchant Centre Next is optimised for Google shopping results.

Product titles are used by Google to match products to relevant search queries and so this is your opportunity to tell Google exactly what it is you are advertising. Ensure you include the most important attributes about your product e.g. brand, product description, size (and gender, if applicable). If you leave valuable information out of the title, it will be more difficult for your ads to show to your intended audience. 

Keeping product pricing, availability and delivery & return information up-to-date is also essential to avoid product disapprovals and ensure your campaigns continue to run smoothly. Regularly monitor disapprovals in Merchant Centre and resolve these as quickly as possible to avoid prolonged periods of downtime.

2. Structuring your campaign for success

The structure of your campaigns and asset groups should be tailored to your broader marketing strategy and take into account factors such as objectives, budget and the size of the product feed. The key is to centre your activity around a clear, focused theme – this could be anything from profit margins to product categories or bestsellers, as long as it aligns with your marketing goals.

To avoid product cannibalisation, steer clear of targeting the same product in two asset groups or campaigns and utilise ‘catch-alls’ to ensure that all products in your feed are eligible to show. If there are some products that you don’t want to advertise (for example they are below a certain price threshold), use feed rules to exclude these from your campaigns.

Particularly the case with larger feeds, you may find that budget restrictions and low performance lead to a reasonable number of products receiving little to no impressions and clicks despite being eligible to serve. To rectify this, we recommend setting up Google’s Low Volume SKU script which moves any SKU’s that aren’t receiving clicks into a separate campaign, with a separate budget, so that they are given the opportunity to start generating clicks. Once they start serving they will automatically move back into their original campaign.

3. Use assets for maximum impact 

When creating an asset group, include a combination of images, videos and text that are relevant to the products you are promoting to provide the consumer with visually engaging content and information about your products.

Google has shared details about the aspect ratio requirements and recommended number of assets, which have been outlined below:

Image asset requirements:

Source: Google Support

Video Specifications:

Source: Google Support

Text asset requirements:

Source: Google Support

Give Google’s algorithms the best chance of success by providing the system with as many assets as possible. The more assets the algorithm has to work with, the more ad combinations it will be able to create to find the best performing ads and maximise performance.

In terms of the creative content, testing is key. Utilise a mix of product and lifestyle assets, as well as images with vs without text and graphic overlays to decipher what works best with your target audience. Within Google Ads, regularly review the performance rating of each asset as this is a good indication of performance relative to other assets of the same type. Replace any assets that have been labelled as “low” with new assets that might perform better.

4. Leverage Audience Signals To Improve Targeting

At the asset group level, provide Google with as much data as possible about your target audience to help guide the algorithm to optimise towards your goals and ultimately, give your campaign the best chance of success. Therefore, it’s important to maximise audience signals by making use of all relevant audience types that are available to you:

• Your data – let Google find people who have previously engaged with your website or made a purchase by adding data such as website visitors, previous customers and customer match lists. 
• Interests & detailed demographics – add relevant affinity and in-market audiences alongside any detailed demographic information or life events that would be relevant to your target customer.
• Search themes – add up to 25 of the most popular words or phrases that consumers would use when searching for products you sell. Google can use this information to help find people who are more likely to convert. 

Conclusion

By leveraging each of these areas, you can enhance your campaign’s performance and help ensure your ads are driving your desired results. Remember to regularly monitor performance, adjust based on the data you receive back, and test different elements to identify the most impactful strategies for your account.