Sometimes it's the little changes and additions to an ad account that can make all the difference.
Often a lagging Performance Max campaign just needs that nudge to shift it into valued growth territory.
I generated nearly $80,000 in revenue for my client's eCommerce supplements business with close to 1,800 in sales and I’m going to tell you how I did it.
I’ll go over my Performance Max strategy and discuss:
The overview (above) shows the campaign’s results. Over a five-month period, starting in September of 2022, this account had a $70,000 increase in revenue, hitting $76,000 overall. Nearly 2,000 purchases helps to maintain our target goal.
And then under Campaigns, we can see it as a percentage breakdown here.
It shows a 30 percent jump in revenue with a 20 percent increase in conversions. And there’s a 40 percent rise in spend overall.
Under Performance Max campaigns, then Asset Groups, I’ll go into the structure of this account prior to taking it over. When I initially accepted this account, this section wasn’t set up correctly.
I began at the asset group level and grabbed all the client's various product categories and separated them into their own asset groups. Now it has its own signal that can be optimized. I selected one of the client’s best sellers, did a custom keyword signal and segmented at the demographic level to ensure Google had the clearest-cut path to optimizing and learning for each of these asset groups.
I started off with some of the top sellers using custom segments and did that for several campaigns.
Then you can see here (above) - the remarketing signal. It currently has images, but it originally had no assets or images. I set it up as a cookie remarketing audience because of the niche. And this audience started spending the most and performing the best initially. As it scaled higher, I added images and videos to make sure it could perform even better.
As noted here, it has an excellent score.
Another scaling type of asset group I added was an inmarket broad signal.
As I’ve mentioned previously, inmarket and affinity signals are winners in pushing the scalability of an account because keywords only hold so much search volume. Google is restricted in how much it expands, even with remarketing. This is the time to introduce other products to inmarket signals or affinity signals directly related to the target audience.
This could be data shown in the Insights tab.
We may see Google recommending certain indexes of users. This data can be tested and may prove to expose the product to new audiences. It’s important to remember: this is connecting with a cold audience that may not be searching for this product at the moment.
Note: An index displays the representation of an audience segment under conversions as compared to the rest of the targeted populations.
Next, let’s look at the current budget. As we’re maintaining ROAS and increasing revenue, I'll add assets and different signals, increasing the budget 20 percent every one to two weeks. Then I watch how it performs from there. If it’s stable, then I'll continue to increase it until we reach a certain level. This is known as vertical scaling.
If it’s no longer vertical scaling, then we add more images and videos to the audience signals.
Under Settings, we see Objectives and Goals.
The first goal we had here was to maximize conversion value.
This is a good place to start. A maximized conversion value bidding goal allows Google to test a wider ceiling of the remarketing custom segment. If a hard target is made, that test will make it harder to scale the campaign. Keep it open. Allow it to collect between 20 to 50 conversions over several weeks, or up to a month. Then when the volume target is being met but ROAS is starting to dip below what is profitable, then a hard target can be set. And it can be followed with a 20 percent budget increase every other week or possibly week-over-week depending on how much is being spent.
Next, we head to All Campaigns, then Campaigns. Supplementary campaigns also boosted the account and helped it propel forward.
We kept the standard shopping campaigns which provide best sellers as well as visibility. A branded search also helps because it often outranks Performance Max for branded search terms. And Search, in general, can beat out Performance Max in terms of the auction due to its ad quality. So, it’s always beneficial to have a catch-all, especially for the best keywords and, specifically, branded keywords.
Then we also have a non-brand for some key terms. It’s not as profitable, but we want to show up for these anyway. Plus, it can get the account jump-started.
This (pic above) shows we had a few experiments running on the shopping side.
We also had a remarketing list running, but that was paused due to poor performance.
So, several supplementary campaigns have been included. Assets, Discover, and YouTube campaigns are great tools in introducing Performance Max to additional networks for further optimization. Dynamic search ads in Shopping are primarily what Performance Max utilizes at the start until the introduction of supplementary campaigns for testing. Then it can be scaled and reviewed for performance. Other networks can then take this data and scale it.
I boosted the revenue on this eCommerce account by evaluating its Performance Max campaign structure and tweaking it. Not only did I change the asset groups' formation, but I also slowly built up the budget to reflect its continuous growth. I also maximized conversion value and made sure this account had supplementary campaigns that allowed it to surface universally on other networks.
Shorten your learning curve, make the most of your resources, an maximize your impact both online and off.
Ted is the founder of TGQ Marketing a PPC, Analytics and CRO agency focused on client results.