GoogleAds forced everyone to transition their Smart Shopping and Location campaigns into Performance Max (PMax) campaigns earlier this year. If you didn’t make the transition by a certain date then GoogleAds automatically transitioned your campaigns on your behalf. If this happened with your campaign(s) then you may need to fix some things.
Table Of Contents
- Collapse Your PMax Campaigns Into A Single Campaign
- Fix Your Landing Pages (This is a BIG one)
- Add Audience Signals
- Add Negative Keywords To Your PMax Campaigns
1. Collapse Your PMax Campaigns Into A Single Campaign
If you had multiple shopping campaigns or a mixture of Location and Shopping campaigns then each of those campaigns were converted into a new PMax campaign. While the setup worked with Shopping campaigns, it doesn’t appear to be the case with PMax campaigns.
GoogleAds recommends only having one PMax campaign per account. At Data Lumination we found this to be true as well. Each time we’ve collapse multiple PMax campaigns into a single PMax campaign there was a lift in performance.
But How Do I Structure My Ads With A Single PMax Campaign?
To answer this question you first need to identify why you had multiple Shopping campaigns to begin with. Were you breaking up your product offerings? Did you put your best performers into a separate campaign? Whatever the case may be, you can recreate this with Asset Groups. You can think of these like ad groups. The PMax campaign will have one budget and this will be divided among the different asset groups.
One thing to point out here is that you can’t see a breakdown of performance by asset group. GoogleAds really forced the PMax campaign type on us but left us without a lot of the basic features we had with Smart Shopping. *insert frustration* Hopefully that’ll change soon.
2. Fix Your Landing Pages (This is a BIG one)
This is a HUGE deal and GoogleAds buried this deep in the campaign settings. By default GoogleAds will serve your PMax ads but the landing page won’t always be what you expect. One would assume that your ads would point to the final URL you specified, but that’s not the case with PMax – where it sends customers to ANY page on your website that Google thinks may be relevant. This means your ad could send people to non-priority pages like your privacy policy page, blog pages, search results page, etc.
How Do I Check My PMax Landing Pages
You can see where your PMax ads have been taking users by going into Google Analytics. Look for the Landing Pages report and apply a segment for users that came from a PMax campaign. You might be surprised by where Google has been sending your traffic.
How Do I Stop PMax From Sending People to the Wrong Landing Page?
To fix this you’ll need to dig into the campaign settings. We weren’t exaggerating when we said this was buried. First, click into the campaign settings for a PMax campaign. Scroll all the way to the bottom and click on Additional Settings. Look for Final URL Expansion and click on it. By default, GoogleAds
This has shown to be an issue for some of our clients as customers were being taken to irrelevant pages on our site that had nothing to do with our ads. By default, Google has this feature automatically set to On: Send traffic to the most relevant URLs on your site. If you want to limit your ads to only point to the landing pages you have in your ad then you can change the setting to Off: Send traffic to provided URLs only. Click Save and your ads will now ONLY serve to the landing pages you specified in your ad or your product feed.
How Do I Limit the Landing Pages For My PMax Ads?
If you like the URL expansion then you can opt to exclude certain pages from appearing in your ads. For instance, maybe you want to exclude your privacy policy page. You can do this by going to the Final URL Expansion setting (see section above for instructions on how to get here) and click on Exclude URLs. Here, you can paste specific URLs you want to exclude such as https://mysite.com/privacy-policy. If you want to exclude an entire sub-folder you can click on the Rules tab to do that. If you were to put a rule to exclude any pages that contain /blog for instance then your PMax ads will no longer take users to any pages on your site that contain /blog.
3. Add Audience Signals
This is a new feature that we haven’t seen with other campaign types, at least not in any recent time. By default, GoogleAds does not have any audience signals selected. You’ll need to add these to take advantage. Audience Signals allow you to target specific types of audiences and can get very granular. You can target visitors of your competitors’ sites, users that search for specific search terms, and even people who have interacted with a specific page of a website. You can add Audience Signals to each one of your asset groups.
How Do I Create An Audience Signal?
To create an audience signal click into your PMax campaign and click on Asset Groups. Look for the Audience Signal header within an asset group and hover over it. A pencil icon should appear and then click on it. You will now be on the Audience Signal page. Click on Add an Audience Signal. Here, you can select +New Audience.
First, select an audience name. We recommend choosing something specific so it’ll be easier to recognize this audience in the future, such as Competitor Site Visitors, or Brand searchers, etc.
Next, add in your targeting options. If you want to target visitors of a specific website you can click on Add or Create custom segments. Click on +New Segment. Create a segment name such as “Competitor Visitors” and then look for the People who browse type of websites at the bottom of the page. Here, you can enter each URL. You can choose a competitor’s homepage or a specific product page if you like.
If you want to target users that search for certain things on Google you can enter those in the Add Google search terms box. You can enter more than one.
We encourage to play around here as there are a wide array of audience signals at your disposal. You can even retarget your site visitors.
Once you have all of your audience signals loaded you can go ahead and hit save at the bottom.
4. Add Negative Keywords To Your PMax Campaigns
One of the biggest blunders with this PMax rollout is there GoogleAds failed to add an option for negative keywords. All of the sudden you have no idea where your budget is going and you could be serving ads that you know don’t work. You can set this for your other campaign types but for Pmax, this option doesn’t really exist.
So How Do I Add Negative Keywords To Pmax?
While you can’t add negative keywords yourself, there is a workaround by reaching out to GoogleAds help support chat. You can do this by going into GoogleAds and clicking on Help in the top navigation menu. At the bottom of the Help menu click on the Contact Us link. Tell them that you want to add negative keywords to your PMax campaigns.
Once you’re connected to an agent they’ll tell you to get the process started they need to send you an email. You’ll need to respond to this email telling them exactly which negative keywords and which Pmax campaigns to add them to. We recommend creating a Negative Keyword list for this process so you may continually add or delete keywords if needed.
Did you try any of these fixes? Or have you found other fixes that worked well? Tell us about it.
Written by Sirena St. Ours
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