Avoiding Common Mistakes in Performance Max Campaigns

As you dive into the world of Performance Max campaigns, you may find yourself navigating a complex landscape of optimization strategies. While these Google Ads campaigns offer powerful tools for reaching your target audience, they also present numerous pitfalls for the unwary advertiser. To help you maximize your campaign's potential and avoid costly missteps, we've identified five critical mistakes that many brands and advertisers make when setting up and managing their Performance Max campaigns. By understanding and sidestepping these common errors, you'll be better equipped to harness the full power of this innovative advertising platform and drive meaningful results for your business.

Mistake #1: Building One Campaign With Too Many Asset Groups

One of the most common performance max mistakes is creating a single campaign with multiple asset groups. This approach can hinder your google ads performance max campaigns by limiting budget allocation. Asset groups allow brands to cover different ways prospects engage with them. However, when sharing a budget, some asset groups may not receive adequate spend. To optimize your performance max best practices, consider using a multi-campaign approach with single asset groups. This strategy ensures each group gets proper attention and resources, maximizing your campaign's effectiveness and providing valuable performance max tips for success. If you do have multiple asset groups in one campaign, ensure that they are of similar value or have similar conversion rate performance, as bid optimizations are made on a campaign level for performance max. This means that asset groups with significantly higher return on ad spend or conversion rates, will over optimize, while the other asset groups will see little auction time that could potentially also provide wins for the business.

Mistake #2: Combining a Wide Variety of SKUs or Products in One Asset Group

Similar to including too many asset groups in one campaign, there is also the performance max mistake of including a diverse group of products together in one asset group. This approach can dilute your campaign's effectiveness, and also essentially confuses the algorithm. Instead, focus on creating targeted asset groups for similar products or SKUs. This strategy aligns with google ads performance max campaigns best practices, allowing for more precise audience targeting and ad relevance.

By segmenting your products strategically, you can optimize your performance max tips implementation. This approach enables you to tailor your messaging and creatives to specific product categories, potentially improving your conversion rates and overall campaign performance. Remember, following performance max best practices is key to maximizing your advertising ROI.

Mistake #3: Neglecting the Insights Report and Not Adding an Exclusion List

One of the most critical performance max best practices is leveraging the Insights Report and implementing a robust exclusion list. The Insights Reports helps you better understand the search themes that are being pulled into your campaign, which you can then exclude based on what is deemed irrelevant for your business. The reason why many advertisers overlook this crucial step is because Google does not make it readily available for advertisers to exclude content. Google makes you fill out a request form with a comprehensive list of what you would like excluded from placements, to keywords to topics. Although this step is quite manual, it will help refine your audience and target, reducing wasted impressions on irrelevant searches and sites. Here is the link to Google's Performance Max Modification Form.

Mistake #4: Keeping URL Expansions On

URL expansion is a feature in performance max Google ads campaigns that can be a double-edged sword. While it may seem beneficial to allow Google to expand your reach, keeping this option on is often a performance max mistake. For well-optimized websites, URL expansion can potentially derail your carefully crafted site structure and SEO efforts. It's crucial to have a comprehensive exclusion list ready before enabling this feature to maintain control over which pages are included in your campaigns. By implementing performance max best practices and being selective with URL expansions, you can ensure your Google ads performance max campaigns remain aligned with your overall marketing strategy.

Mistake #5: Not Excluding Brand List and Brand Keywords

One of the most critical performance max best practices is excluding your brand list and brand keywords from campaigns. Neglecting this step can significantly inflate your data, making your Performance Max campaigns appear more successful than they truly are. According to PPC Mastery, 10-15% (and up to 42%) of conversions in Performance Max campaigns can come from branded searches. To avoid this pitfall, utilize Google Ads' Brand Exclusions feature, which prevents your ads from showing for specified branded queries in Search and Shopping traffic. This google ads performance max campaigns tip ensures more accurate performance assessment and budget allocation. Our preferred strategy is to utilize a standard search campaign for brand queries, which gives you better control on CPCs and costs over performance max.

When should you use Performance Max?

Performance Max is ideal when you're ready to leverage data-driven strategies for maximizing sales and conversions. It's particularly effective for brands aiming to implement both top-of-funnel and lower-funnel tactics. Typically, Performance Max campaigns thrive when they generate around 60 conversions per month. This campaign type shines in scenarios where you want to optimize your google ads performance max campaigns across multiple channels simultaneously. However, it's crucial to follow performance max best practices and avoid common performance max mistakes to ensure success. Remember, while Performance Max offers powerful automation, it requires careful setup and monitoring to achieve optimal results.