Quick question: What exactly does Performance Max maximize?
I’ll let you go first.
You: “Performance Max maximized my profits.”
Me: “No.”
You: “Ah, I see. I am tracking revenue, not profit. So Performance Max maximizes my revenue”
Me: “Nope.”
You: “Uhh, OK, then it must be conversions
Me: “No, again.”
You: “What? What else is there? Clicks then?”
Me: “No, no, no!”
You: “WTF?!”
Me: “It’s spend. Ad spend. Performance Max maximizes your ad spend, as long as you let it.”
If you are 100% convinced the last statement is complete BS, you can stop reading now. The rest of this article won’t bring you much.
If, however, you are like me and you think it’s an interesting hypothesis worth testing and letting the data speak for itself, then read on. This might be of interest to you.
And if you are already convinced it is true, then this is your lucky day because we’ve got some interesting scripts to help prevent Performance Max from wasting your money.
What follows are three scripts taken from my latest SMX Advanced presentation. Use these scripts to your advantage and be sure to watch the full video of the session (at bottom of this article).
Script 1: Negate non-converting Performance Max search terms
Performance Max excels at reporting averages, such as the average spend per day, conversion rate and campaign ROAS.
It’s not good at reporting the actual performance of individual search terms.
Yes, you can go to the Google Ads interface, click Insights and Reports, navigate the search category report and click around like a rabbit on speed. But it’s clumsy, to say the least!
It’s difficult to find search terms that waste money in your Performance Max campaigns.
The terms themselves are hard to find in the interface, and the performance of bad actors is hidden in the campaign averages.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a list that clearly shows the search terms with poor performance?
You could easily decide what to do with them (e.g., fix asset groups/landing pages) or add them as negative keywords to your Performance Max campaign.
Luckily, we can use scripts to create such a list for us. Here’s what that looks like:
Script 2: Disapproved products alerts
Let’s say you’ve been running a successful Performance Max campaign for a few weeks.
The campaign is spending its budget, generating relevant clicks, generating conversions and achieving ROAS slightly over the target. All is well.
Then, for some reason, the two top-performing products in your campaign, which are responsible for more than 40% of the revenue, get disapproved.
What do you think will happen?