What's the best structure for Performance Max campaigns?

Are you struggling to figure out the best structure for your Google Ads campaigns? Should you segment or consolidate? In Episode 90 of the Inside Google Ads podcast, host Jyll Saskin Gales answers your questions about the crucial topic of Google Ads account structure, focusing on Performance Max campaigns, but also touching on Search and Shopping.

Key Topics Discussed:

• PMax Asset Group Strategy: Why segmenting asset groups by only audience signals is a mistake, and the single most important factor for creating a new asset group
• Consolidation vs. Segmentation: The four main reasons to separate products into different campaigns
• Testing Consolidation: A simple, low-risk technique using shared budgets and bid strategies to test a consolidated campaign approach
• PMax and Other Campaigns: The risks of running Performance Max alongside Standard Shopping or Search campaigns simultaneously

Plus, stay tuned until the end of the episode for a new Insider Challenge to solve!

Do you have a question for Jyll? Drop a comment on Spotify, YouTube, or any of her social media posts, and she'll answer it for you in an upcoming episode.

You can get Inside Google Ads episode transcripts delivered to your inbox each week by signing up for free at https://free.jyll.ca/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=episode90
 
Google Ads Coaching
Need some expert help with your Google Ads campaigns? Book a call with Jyll! Learn more at https://jyll.ca/pages/google-ads-coach?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=episode90

Inside Google Ads course
Join more than 400+ Google Ads practitioners in Jyll's Inside Google Ads membership course. You'll find up-to-date Google Ads tutorials, and you can ask Jyll your questions at an exclusive live video call every single month. Learn more at https://learn.jyll.ca/iga?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=episode90

Resources mentioned in this episode

• Blog: How Can I Target Similar Audiences in Google Ads? https://learn.jyll.ca/blog/how-can-i-target-similar-audiences-in-google-ads?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=episode90

Read more about this topic on Jyll's Google Ads Blog

• Should You Run Search and Performance Max Campaigns Together? https://learn.jyll.ca/blog/should-you-run-search-and-performance-max-campaigns-together?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=episode90
• Performance Max vs. Standard Shopping: Which is better for ecommerce? https://learn.jyll.ca/blog/performance-max-vs-standard-shopping-which-is-better-for-ecommerce?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=episode90
• Google Ads Campaign Structure: When to Use Multiple Campaigns for One Goal https://learn.jyll.ca/blog/google-ads-campaign-structure-when-to-use-multiple-campaigns-for-one-goal?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=episode90

Follow Jyll on social media
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jyllsaskingales
https://www.youtube.com/@the_google_pro
https://www.instagram.com/the_google_pro
https://www.threads.net/@the_google_pro

Transcript

When should you create a different asset group versus creating a different campaign?

Is it better to have one campaign with lots of ad groups, or lots of different campaigns, each with just one ad group?

Is consolidation or segmentation a better idea for your Google Ads account? And does it depend on whether that's a Performance Max campaign or a more standard Shopping or Search campaign?

I'm your host, Jyll Saskin Gales. I spent six years working for big brands at Google, and now I work for you.

This is Inside Google Ads: Episode 90, PMax Account Structure.

Our first question comes from Jay Chattria on YouTube, and they say, how many asset groups should we use in a single Performance Max campaign for one product category? Right now, I'm using three asset groups, one with search terms, one with demo and interest audiences, and one with past converters and site visitors, but I'm not getting good results. Would you suggest something else?

Why, Jay, I would suggest something else!

One of the key mistakes I see people make when setting up a Performance Max campaign is creating different asset groups for different audience signals. And I get it. You're used to Search campaigns where you like to group your different ad groups by keywords, by intent, or maybe a Video campaign where you group your different ad groups by different audiences.

But an audience signal and search themes are not the same thing as keywords and audience targeting. In Performance Max, these are just signals, mere suggestions. That is all.

So if you create a lot of different asset groups with the same assets and just different signals, you are doing yourself no favours. You are likely targeting the same searchers, the same audiences, the same people multiple times out of all your different asset groups. And because of that, having, let's say, four separate asset groups instead of one asset group, your learning gets split across all of them, which means it takes longer for your campaign to drive good results. Definitely not what we want with an automated campaign type like PMax or frankly any campaign type.

So here's your rule of thumb. The reason to create a different asset group in PMax is because you have different assets. Maybe you're arranging different products into different asset groups. Maybe you're testing out different imagery or different messaging. 

For example, I have one client I'm working with who is running a Performance Max campaign. We're running the same products in two different asset groups, but targeted to two very different audiences. And that doesn't mean the audience signals need to be different, though they are. It means the ad creative itself is very different, even though the product is the same.

For example, one ad group is targeting parents, one ad group is targeting older people, but the underlying product is the same. It could just appeal to these two very different audiences. Therefore, we put it in two separate asset groups.

Remember, since your audience signals and search themes are just suggestions, it's really your assets, your creative in Performance Max, that guides your targeting. So having different products, different headlines, different images, different videos, that's what's going to cause your asset groups to serve to different kinds of people. If you only have one set of assets, you only need one asset group.

So Jay, try consolidating your campaign, throw whatever audience signals you want into one single audience signal, and I bet you'll start to see some better results.

Performance Max campaigns have been around for a few years now, but their features are constantly changing. So if you're feeling like you're struggling to keep up, you might want to check out my Inside Google Ads course. I have in-depth, up-to-date tutorials about how to set up and optimize your Performance Max campaigns, as well as Shopping, Demand Gen, Search, local services ads, Video and more.

Plus, if you have any questions, you don't need to just drop a comment on social media and hope I'll answer it on the podcast. My Inside Google Ads course members can ask me questions at any time. I respond within a few business days. And they get to join an exclusive one-hour live call with me and guest experts. You can join Inside Google Ads today at learn.jyll.ca. That's J-Y-L-L dot C-A or follow the link in the episode description.

Our second question comes from omgg on YouTube and they say, I sell jewelry gifts with meaningful message cards, some personalized, others non-personalized. Should I put both personalized and non-personalized necklaces in the same Search or Shopping campaign under different ad groups, or should I create separate campaigns for each?

There are four different reasons you might want to put things in separate Google Ads campaigns rather than putting them all in the same one. 

1. If you're targeting different locations
2. If you want to designate different budgets
3. If you want to set different conversion goals, for example, one campaign driving online purchases and one driving in-store purchases.
4. And if you want to choose a different bid strategy, maybe one campaign is more just trying to get clicks and another is trying to drive ROAS.

So if personalized and non-personalized necklaces need some of those things to be different, then you can put them in different campaigns.

If, however, your location targeting, budget, conversion tracking and bid strategy are all the same, then you're probably better off with a consolidated approach, putting it in one campaign and breaking it out into different ad groups by intent.

However, if you're still not sure, here's the hack I recommend. Create different campaigns, but then put them on a shared budget and a shared bid strategy. This is what I'll often recommend to my Google Ads coaching clients if we first start working together and they have like 10 different campaigns. Rather than getting them to turn everything off and set it all up in a new campaign, which could take a lot of time to ramp up and learn, I suggest keeping the current segmented structure, but applying a shared budget and a shared bid strategy. By doing so, you're essentially turning everything into one campaign while still sort of keeping them separate. And it lets you test out what a more consolidated approach might achieve for you.

I have literally never seen a case with my Google Ads coaching clients where consolidation has not driven better results. It always wins, but still, I'm not going to say that I can guarantee the same will be true for you. So try using that shared budget and bid strategy if you want to test what consolidation would look like. And then if that works well for you, you can honestly just leave it, or you can then start to actually consolidate everything into a more unified campaign structure whether it's a Search campaign or a Shopping campaign.

I would, however, at least put personalized and non-personalized necklaces into separate ad groups. Don't just have one campaign with one ad group and everything thrown in there, because there's definitely two different kinds of offers and two different kinds of intents going on with your business.

Our final question today comes from KeepItReal on TikTok, and they say, can you have both Performance Max and Shopping ads going at the same time? That's what I'm doing at the moment.

You can, but I recommend proceeding with caution. And everything I'm about to say, by the way, also applies to running Performance Max and Search at the same time.

Remember, Performance Max can do everything Search and Shopping can do and everything Demand Gen campaigns can do. It runs across all inventory. So if you're running PMax and Shopping at the same time and you haven't filtered the products at all, then you are duplicating your efforts.

Now, why is that a bad thing? Why is duplication a bad thing?

It's not that you're going to be competing against yourself in the auction and driving up prices. It's that if Performance Max and Shopping are both advertising the same product, only one of them gets to actually enter the auction every time someone searches for something that matches to your feed. 

So instead of having one single product running out of Shopping, for example, which gets all the impressions and all the clicks and all the spend and all the conversion data, instead you're having it learn twice in two separate places. You may end up with an even 50-50 split, but often weirder things can happen because maybe one campaign is limited by budget and another isn't. Or maybe the bid strategies are really different. So you'll think one is working better when really it's just because you put a higher ROAS there. So it's being forced to perform better than the other one.

Here's an analogy that might help. Let's say you have a finite supply of water. If you're just trying to pour that water into a single cup, you can fill that cup to the top. But if you're trying to pour that same water into two cups, it's going to take twice as long to fill both those cups. And you can't even drink from two cups at the same time, so it's probably going to be a waste anyway.

If you are running Performance Max and Shopping together, I recommend filtering the products so that maybe Performance Max targets some and Shopping targets others. That's what one client of mine is doing right now. We have a Shopping campaign for her top performing products, and then we have a Performance Max campaign of other products that haven't historically performed that well in Shopping, so we wanted to give them that additional boost of having search and imagery and video and all kinds of other things behind them.

This can be more complicated if it's Performance Max and Search, because you can't just filter by products there.

I audited an account recently where they had a Branded Search campaign, but it was limited by budget. And so a bunch of Branded Searches were showing up in their Performance Max search terms report. And their agency tried to fight that by adding a whole bunch of brand negatives. But I pointed out, actually, that's not the issue. The reason Performance Max is picking up all those brand searches is because your Branded Search campaign ran out of budget! And so it says, “Those searches are available. Now, of course, I'm going to grab them. That's going to help me get a really high ROAS.”

So the solution to fix that problem isn't adding more negatives to PMax, it was sufficiently funding the Search campaign. This is just one example of how duplicating your efforts across Search and Performance Max can cause wasted ad spend and unintended results.

What I'm generally recommending these days is if Performance Max performs well for you, just use Performance Max. It can cover everything. If Performance Max doesn't work well for you, or for whatever reason you don't want to use Performance Max, then stick to your individual campaign types: Search, Demand Gen, and then Shopping, if applicable.

Don't waste all your water trying to completely fill two cups when all you really need is one cup of water to drink.

Today's Insider Challenge is this. For an e-commerce business, brand new to advertising, but not a new business, do you prefer starting with Performance Max or starting with a standard Shopping? What's your rationale? And if it depends, what does it depend on?

The beauty of the Insider Challenge is there's no right or wrong answer, just an opportunity to stretch your brain on real-life Google Ads problem solving. 

Last Episode's Challenge, Episode 89, was this. One popular Google Ads feature that was deprecated a few years ago is similar audiences. Now, there are a lot of different ways to get similar results, but none are exactly the same. So tell me, what's your favorite similar segments replacement?

I cheated a little with this challenge because I already have a blog post about this topic. As a quick reminder, the way similar audiences worked is Google would find a group of people who were similar to your remarketing list. These were automatically created segments, and when there was sufficient data to do so, Google Ads would automatically create a similar audience based off of every one of your data segments.

There are really two ways - that I know of, at least - to try to approximate the same functionality today. 

The first, of course, is a lookalike segment, but there are a few key differences. First, you can only use a lookalike segment in a Demand Gen campaign, so pretty limited compared to what similar audiences used to do. Second, you have to create your lookalike segments. They're not automatically created for you. And third, a lookalike doesn't just find people who are the most similar to your remarketing list. Instead, you have to choose narrow, balanced, or broad. 

Let's say you choose balanced at 5%, and then the country you've chosen for your list is the United States. That means Google is going to find the 5% of Americans who are most similar to the people on your list. That is millions and millions of people. So that is way broader than what similar segments did, which was just find the people who are most similar and then done. Full stop.

For this reason, I don't like to build Lookalike segments on anything other than a customer list, and even then I'll only do it if it's a medium to larger sized business. 

The better replacement for similar audiences, in my opinion, is optimized targeting. What optimized targeting does is find people who are similar to people who have converted. So it's like a similar audience to your converters.

And by the way, this is how Performance Max campaigns work. Performance Max campaigns are completely powered by Dynamic Search ads on the search side and then optimized targeting on the image and video side.

Of course, the downsides are that optimized targeting can go really broad, really fast, if you're not careful. And it's going to be built up of people who are similar to any of your converters, not just purchasers or just form fills.

I'm curious, do you have a different tactic you use to replace similar audiences?

I'm Jyll Saskin Gales and I'll see you next time Inside Google Ads.