Performance Max Feed-Only Campaigns

The one constant about Google Ads is that things are always changing. Every once in a while (always), Google likes to introduce a little chaos to the mix by upending years-old strategies. Google Ads veterans will remember that Smart Shopping campaigns used to be a key tool in the arsenal for e-commerce until they were replaced by Performance Max campaigns. Smart Shopping campaigns use smart bidding strategies like Maximize for Conversions or Conversion Value, to optimize spend towards the customers most likely to buy the product. 

Performance Max (PMax) does the same thing in theory, but it can show your ads on things other than the Google Search page, like banner ads and YouTube ads. For those who wanted to show ads on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), Smart Shopping was the way to go. And luckily, we’ve found a way to roughly re-create them: Performance Max feed-only campaigns. In other words, these are PMax campaigns with no logo, image, video, or text assets. 

These types of campaigns are great to use if you don’t have high-quality images, videos, and other assets to use. They also could be useful if you want to primarily show on the SERP and not show in the Display or YouTube networks.

How To Create a Performance Max Feed-Only Campaign

To set this campaign up, you’ll need to go through the steps to set up a Performance Max campaign. Click on the + sign, and create a new campaign. 

1. Select sales as the campaign objective, and choose Performance Max as the campaign type. 
2. The key step is when you get to the asset group ad page (where normally you would upload images, text ads, and videos) you don’t add anything. Do not create any headlines, long headlines, or descriptions. Don’t add any images, logos, or videos. If there are any assets that are automatically added, like a business logo, you will need to remove them. 

1. The only thing that needs to be edited is the landing page URL; you will still want to direct users to the right page on your site. This could be a specific product page or a category page. 
2. Once you finish creating the ad part of the asset group, go to the listing group section. Here you can select the group of products that you want the campaign to advertise. This section is especially important since the vast majority of the spend will be going towards Shopping ads, which are dependent on the products selected in the listing group. 

4. You can also put in audience signals to guide the campaign to the customers you want to target. These signals include options to target people based on their interests, life events, or detailed demographics, including people who have interacted with your business before and search terms you think your target audience might be using. 

5. Lastly, you’ll want to make sure that automatically created assets are off! You can find this option in the settings tab of the campaign. 

If this setting is left on, Google will automatically create generic headlines and descriptions for you. This makes it more likely that Google will use your spend on text or image ads instead of Shopping ads. 

A PMax campaign usually has all of these symbols, meaning it shows on shopping, YouTube, the Display, and the Discovery network.

You can tell you’ve successfully created a Performance Max feed-only campaign if you see only these symbols on the asset group page. 

As this shows, a PMax feed-only campaign completely stops your ads from being shown on the Discovery network. And while it could still show in other places like YouTube and the Display network, the chances are greatly reduced because the campaign doesn’t have the proper assets to work with. Most of the spend is directed towards Shopping ads, pulled from your Google Merchant Center feed, which will hopefully mean that the ad traffic coming to your site will be much more relevant. Users who see a Shopping ad will know exactly what product they are clicking on and what it costs.    

Performance Max feed-only campaigns aren’t a silver bullet to getting good sales numbers or a great ROAS, but we have seen them succeed with many of our e-commerce clients. Because of the heavy focus on shopping and PMax’s ability to hone in on your desired audience, a feed-only campaign is one of the best tools you have to sell your products on Google Ads.