Optimization tips for Performance Max campaigns with a Google Merchant Center feed

Performance Max uses Google's AI to help you get more conversions and more value out of your campaigns through bidding, targeting, creatives, and attribution. It's built to work for many different marketing goals and media channels.

This article explains the best ways to use Performance Max campaigns with online sales, store sales, or omnichannel sales as goals while you're using a Merchant Center data source. We recommend following the tips below to set up your Performance Max campaigns for success.

	Lay the foundation for your Performance Max campaign Set up your campaign Campaign duration: Run your campaigns for at least 6 weeks. This gives Google's AI enough time to get started and gather data so it can compare how things are going. Audience signal: Google's AI powers Performance Max campaigns. Use relevant audience lists as signals to help Google's AI learn faster and enhance your campaign results. You can use remarketing lists, custom intent lists, Customer Match (your own customer lists), and similar groups as signals. Enhance your product data feed better to help your ads stand out Upload rich product descriptions and images, and update product prices and availability if they change often. Note: Add images with 500 x 500 pixels or greater resolution to your Google Merchant Center catalog to serve product feeds on Connected TV (CTV) for YouTube Shopping ads. Ensure listed products are approved and use the Product issues column to identify missing product data attributes or spot underperforming offers. Add a local product data feed to automatically enable local inventory ads in your campaigns to promote products and promotions available in stores. You can also use your product data feed to attract consumer attention to your ads with deals by creating promotions or price drop annotations. Set up free and fast shipping annotations to show you can ship quickly, and use return annotations to highlight return windows like “Free 90-day returns”. Consider including custom labels in your product data feed to signal that a product is high-priority. For example, “bestseller,” “trending,” or “holiday product”. You can then use the labels to segment these products into separate campaigns or asset groups if needed. Unlock business growth with better measurement Set up a strong Google tag across your whole website. This helps you collect the most important information for your business. Set up enhanced conversions. This makes your conversion tracking more exact and lets you use stronger bidding strategies. Assign a store visit value or use store sales values. This helps you measure the full buying journey and improve your campaign to get more in-store purchases. You can also create custom variables for store sales. This lets you view more detailed reports based on customer segments or product categories. If you have an app, you can make it easier for users to go from your website to your app by using Web to App Connect. You can also set up deep links to send users right to the correct page in your app when they tap your ads on their mobile web. You'll also be able to measure what happens in your app, such as purchases and sign-ups. This helps you improve your campaign's performance. Share conversion values for better optimization and reporting When you use conversion tracking, you can assign the same value to all conversions or let each conversion have different values. For retailers, we strongly recommend providing transaction-specific values for each conversion if your customers are purchasing items with different prices and you want to maximize total revenue. Use conversion value rules to add more value information to your account (for example, different margins for different types of customers, or lifetime value considerations). This information allows you to optimize for more specific goals. Set higher or lower values for different types of customers, devices, locations, store visits, or store sales.
	Plan budgets early, but be ready for additional sales Use Performance Planner to identify budget and bid strategies that will maximize conversion value Use Performance Planner to view how your campaigns might do each month and quarter. Performance Planner helps you with ideas to make your ads perform better with the same spend. It shows you how changing your budget or bid targets affects your results. Performance Planner also considers seasonal events such as holidays, so you can find chances for more conversion opportunities during those times. Explore demand forecasts to take advantage of increased demand Demand forecasts can help you understand predicted upcoming trends for your business, so you can plan budgeting and bidding strategies accordingly. Review when demand is likely to start increasing: You may already know events that are important to your business, such as Black Friday. Find out how demand is forecasted to increase for the products and services related to these major seasonal events. Identify new events related to your business: There may be less well-known events that increase the demand for your products and services. Review these and consider adjusting your campaigns to capture that demand. Check recommendations for tips on budgeting, bidding, and more Check your optimization score to understand how much more your campaigns can grow. A higher score means your ads are working better. Also, look at your recommendations for ideas on how to make your ads better. For example, you may view a recommendation to raise or re-distribute your budgets for upcoming traffic increases when our simulations show that you could miss out on potential customers or that your ads may even stop running on your busiest days. You can also find and use other recommendations to improve your campaigns, such as optimizing for new customer acquisition. Use seasonality adjustments for short promotional or other events If you expect your conversion rates to change a lot for a short time, you can use seasonality adjustments to get ready. Seasonality adjustments are great for short, non-frequent events, where you expect a significant change (like more than 30%) in conversion rates over a short time (less than 7 days). For example, a 3-day mega sale or Black Friday weekend. You can only use seasonality adjustments on campaigns that have been running for a while because they need past conversion history. If you are running a longer promotion or expect a smaller conversion rate change, we suggest manually adjusting ROAS or CPA targets to help Smart Bidding handle the seasonal changes.
	Set up your campaigns for success Make your campaign setup simpler so Google AI learns faster When you start a new Performance Max campaign, you should make its structure as simple as possible. Google AI works best when it can make your ads better across all places using a unified budget. When to create multiple campaigns Sometimes, you might need separate Performance Max ad campaigns. For example, you might have different campaigns for different countries or languages, budgets, or ROAS targets for new products, best-selling products, seasonal moments, or different store locations. During the holidays, you might want to focus on certain types of products. You could create separate Performance Max campaigns for those products. You might want one campaign for holiday products, one for high-margin products, and one for everything else. In these cases, setting a lower ROAS target can also help more customers view these products in the weeks before peak periods when many customers are browsing. When to use multiple asset groups in a single campaign Create multiple "asset groups" inside the same campaign to put together assets that should serve in ads in sets or themes. For example, different asset groups for dinner plates versus bowls. You may also want to create more asset groups if certain assets are more relevant for specific groups of customers. For example, you might want different assets for a customer match list of people who bought bikes, because you now want to sell bike helmets to him. Target different products with each asset group. For example, Products A-L in Asset Group 1 and Products M-Z in Asset Group 2. For holidays, we suggest making new holiday-specific asset groups inside your existing campaigns. This safeguards your regular products sales and helps your holiday sales do well. You should upload new holiday ads and asset groups at least 2 weeks in advance to make sure they get approved in time. Use asset group scheduling to activate the holiday or seasonal asset groups at a specific time. For example, you could plan a new set of holiday-themed assets ahead of a special sitewide sale or promotion.
	Provide Google AI with key information for better results Use a value-based bidding strategy to drive more performance for your budget After you set values for your conversions, apply a value-based bidding strategy that matches your business goals. Use Maximize conversion value bidding to help Google AI maximize the total conversion value of your campaign within your daily budget. For better results, set a ROAS target that will bring you the most profit. Think about how much your products cost and a customer’s lifetime value. Reach new customers with the new customer acquisition goal Use the new customer acquisition goal to maximize revenue while driving more new customers to your business. Choose the New Customer Value mode to optimize your campaign to focus on and bid higher for new customers, while still maximizing sales from existing customers. There's also a beta version called "New Customer Acquisition with High Value optimization". It helps you focus on new customers who are expected to spend a lot of money over time, while also still focusing on getting regular new customers and keeping existing ones. Reach out to your Google account team for more information. Choose "New Customer Only" mode if you only want to get new customers. However, with this mode, you might miss out on sales from customers who already bought from you before, and might not buy again without viewing your ad. New Customer Only mode only makes sense in some situations, like when you have a specific budget just for getting new customers. Provide as many data sources as possible to accurately detect whether someone is a new or repeat customer. Share your own definition of a new customer with website tagging (Global Site Tag and new customer parameters), provide a first-party customer list of existing customers via Customer Match, and opt in to conversion-based customer lists. Reach the right audiences by using first-party data Add audience signals that help Google AI find relevant customers and drive more conversions. Your consented first-party data from previous purchasers shared via Customer Match is the most valuable type of audience signal. Custom segments are another useful audience signal to provide insight into the search terms, website URLs, and apps your customers typically engage with. Update these lists regularly to make sure your campaigns are making the best choices based on up-to-date information. Make your ads diverse and maximize your creative assets to connect with more customers If you have online sales goals, your product feed will be used as a starting point to create and show your ads. We strongly suggest that you also add a variety of text, image and video assets and refresh them regularly. This allows your Performance Max campaign to serve across more eligible inventory so you can achieve the best results possible. If you’re focusing to store goals, you must include all types of creative assets: text headlines, descriptions, images, logos, video, calls-to-action, business name, and a final URL. To make it easier to provide high-quality video ads, video creation tools are now integrated directly into Performance Max campaign setup and editing workflows. Note: If you don’t provide your own video creative, then one or more videos may be auto-generated to help you drive more conversions from this inventory. These videos draw from your existing text assets, images, and product feed to maximize video quality and relevance. Note: Text customization was formerly known as automatically created assets. Turn on text customization and final URL expansion to drive more sales from Search First, keep text customization turned on. This helps Google make more relevant headlines and descriptions that are better matched to what a user is searching for. Then, keep final URL expansion turned on. This helps you find new search words that lead to sales. It also replaces your main website link with another page on your website that better matches what a user wants. Final URL expansion also gives text customization more landing page options to use, which helps you create more diverse and relevant ads. If you need to apply exclusions to final URL expansion, you can use URL exclusions or URL parameter rules, account-level negative keywords, and campaign-level brand exclusions. Note: Final URL expansion is isn’t available to campaigns that only optimize to store goals.
	Use reporting and insights to evaluate your results Understand changes in performance With better asset group reporting, you can view conversions, conversion value, cost, and a variety of other metrics at the asset group level. Find out how different asset groups affect performance and where you should make improvements like adding creative assets or making existing assets better. Use explanations to understand why your ad performance changed. Explanations tell you why big changes happened and suggest what to do to fix problems and improve performance. Top signals in your bid strategy report also help you find out what things affect how your ads perform. Top signals can include things like the type of device used, location, day of week, time of day, search terms, and Customer Match lists. Check performance shifts insights to find out which assets groups, products, and product types are driving performance changes. Find out which creative assets are working well Use Ad Strength to understand if your asset quality is "low," "good," or "best". It also tells you if you need to add new assets for Google AI to use. If you already have the maximum number of allowed assets, you can swap out your lower-quality ones for new, higher-quality assets.. Understand your best-performing asset combinations for each asset group with the Combinations report. This report also helps you understand how your different text, image, and video ads are used in various ad styles. Explore asset audience insights to view which ads work best with different audience segments. Use this to help you create new ads that attract the best-performing audiences. Understand your top customers and find new ones Check out audience insights to understand top interests and behaviors of the customers who convert from your Performance Max campaigns and to find out which audiences convert at higher rates. Understand conversion data for segments you entered as audience signals by looking at segments with a “Signals” label. Focus on segments marked “Optimized” to learn the new audience segments Google AI helped discover that you may not have known about previously. Explore how your customers are searching Use search terms insights to understand what your customers search for. Now, you can even pick custom dates to view past insights. You can view search trends to understand if you're keeping up with increased demand in categories important to your business. Use these insights to plan your budgets, inventory, promotions, and landing pages based on what customers are searching for. View reports for retail businesses View reports made for retail businesses. Use product insights on the Products page in Google Ads. These help you find ways to make individual products better based on how much they could sell. You can also make changes more easily with actionable recommendations. With the diagnostics tab, you can also find and fix issues that might be impacting how well individual products are performing. With category insights on the Products page in Google Ads, you can view which product categories are trending. You can also change how detailed you view these categories and subcategories. View your best selling products in the Popular products report in Google Merchant Center. You can use this report to understand what brands and products customers want. Then, you can decide which products to show most in your ads. Use the price competitiveness report in Google Merchant Center. This helps you see how competitors are pricing similar products by type, country, and brand. Use this info to make your pricing and bidding plans better for your best products.