7 Mistakes That Eat the Budget of Your PMax Campaigns

Google PMax Campaigns – Avoiding Mistakes

Google's PMax campaigns are an innovative way to optimise your online advertising. With Performance Max campaigns you can tailor your ads to different audiences and increase your conversion rate.

But PMax campaigns are not without pitfalls. In this post you'll learn which 7 mistakes to avoid if you want to run PMax campaigns successfully – and why PMax is worth it despite its challenges.

1. Final URL Expansion Enabled Without Monitoring

This setting allows Google to advertise URLs that aren't included in the product feed. In e-commerce these would be category pages, for example. But it can easily happen that Google suddenly starts advertising blog or how-to pages. Because of their low conversion rate, these pages almost always need to be excluded via URL rules.

2. Building Campaigns Based on the Optimisation Score

https://lnkd.in/e88qbErp Here we showed that the optimisation score does not correlate with campaign success. In my view, nothing has changed since.

3. Excluding Brand Keywords

You don't want your Performance Max to bid on the same keywords as your brand search campaign, so you exclude your brand in PMax? Fair enough – but that also kicks your brand out of the Shopping panel. And the brand campaign wouldn't have been cannibalised anyway because of PMax's lower Ad Rank.

4. Never Looking at the Insights

The insights contain two interesting tables. First, the audiences for which PMax performs strongly – these should find their way into the audience signals of your asset groups. Second, the search terms. They can be used for many purposes: negative keyword lists, search campaigns, SEO, inspiration for new products and more.

5. Setting the Language to German Only

I almost always recommend targeting all languages. Even if people abroad speak perfect German, their browser is often still set to their native language – and that's just one example. Nobody wants to exclude these millions of potential customers from their campaigns.

6. Not Using the WebSavvy PMax Script

This script shows which channels Google is investing in: Search, Shopping, Display or YouTube. That lets you make sure your marketing budget doesn't drift into completely inefficient channels. It also lets you monitor the performance of your asset groups.

7. No Regular Feed Optimisation

50 % of the success of Performance Max campaigns comes from the quality of the feed. Perfect product data and product pages are the key to high revenue. SEA has become like SEO: when in doubt, data quality decides who wins the auction for an ad slot. Trash in, trash out.