Setting up Performance Max Retail campaigns

Performance Max (Pmax) is a campaign type that allows advertisers to access all of their Google Ads inventory from one single campaign, simplifying how you reach your goals across the Google Network. For more information about Performance Max campaigns, visit this page.

In this article, we explain how you can set up a Performance max campaign with Channable. 

Step 1: Send your products to Google Merchant Center

When you want to set up a Performance Max campaign, it is necessary to send your product information to Google Merchant Center. Google Merchant Center is the online portal used to send your items to Google Shopping.

There are two ways to send your product information to Google Merchant Center from Channable: both options are explained in this article. Once you've sent your product information to Google Merchant Center, you can create Performance Max campaigns via our Shopping Ads API. 

Step 2: Creating a new Dynamic Shopping Ads generator

To get started with your new Performance Max campaign, click on the Shopping Ads tab on the left-hand side menu. Then click the "+ Add dynamic shopping ads generator" button. This opens a new screen in which you have to choose:

1. Connect with: The Google Ads connection to which you want to send your Performance Max campaign.
2. Name: A name for your Performance Max campaign (this is not going to be the name of your campaign in Google Ads, it's just the name in the Channable interface).
3. Unique ID per item: A unique ID per product (choose the field that is connected to the ID field in your Google Shopping feed).
4. Google Merchant ID: The Google Merchant ID in which your Google Shopping feed is imported.
5. Campaign type: Performance Max campaign.
6. Use master rule group (optional): Choose a master rule group. You can use the master rule groups, for example, to filter certain items from your feed or to set standard values. You can find more information about master rule groups in this article.

Step 3: Configure Google Ads status & Sync status

After creating a new generator, you can configure different statuses in the 'Settings' step of the generator. Click on Settings and you will see the saved settings from Step 2 and the following settings: 

There are two different statuses in Google Ads: active and paused. Every campaign, ad group, ad, (negative) keyword, etc. can be active or paused. It is important to give some attention to these settings, please read this article for an explanation of each possible setting. 

Step 4: Setting up rules

After creating a generator and setting up the Google Ads & Sync status settings, it is time to set up rules. In order for the Performance Max ads to work as effectively as possible, copy the rules of your Google Shopping feed to the Shopping ad generator. After doing that, you can add extra rules for filtering out products.

Step 5: Creating a new Performance Max campaign

Under the campaigns step, you set up the basic settings for the campaign. You need to fill in the following settings: 

1. Campaign name: This can be set with a static value or can be filled in with a dynamic field from your import. When using a dynamic field, it allows you to generate multiple shopping campaigns on Google with the same generator. Note that Channable will connect to already existing campaigns that have the same title in both Channable and Google. For example, if you have a campaign template with"[brand] shoes" where [brand] is a dynamic field, Channable may generate campaigns entitled Adidas shoes and Nike shoes. If you already have a campaign named Nike shoes on Google, then Channable will connect to Nike shoes. Channable will then additionally create a new campaign entitled Adidas shoes, since that one did not exist previously.
   
   
2. Campaign country: Once you filled in the name, you can choose your campaign country. Select the country out of the drop-down list. Note that this is the country of sale, it does not concern targeting
   
   
3. Daily budget: Next, you can choose a daily budget in the local currency of your account. You can pick a budget for each campaign based on your advertising goals and the average amount you're comfortable spending each day.
   
   
4. Target ROAS bidding: Select your Target ROAS bidding strategy in the campaigns tab.
   In Channable there are two types of Target ROAS bidding strategies supported:
   

When you choose the Custom Target ROAS strategy, you also need to set a Target ROAS. Target ROAS lets you bid based on a target return on ad spend (ROAS). This value must be between 0.01 and 1000. 

Step 6: Creating asset groups

You can now create your (dynamic) asset groups. By default, there will be only one Asset group generator in which you can configure your asset groups, but you can create multiple ones to split your campaigns into many relevant asset groups, e.g. based on categories, brands, or promotions.

To add a new Asset Group generator, click on the ‘Add dynamic asset group generator’ button in this overview.

Within each asset group generator, you can create one or multiple asset groups, using either a static field or a dynamic field.

Step 7: Creating Assets

You can now use Channable to create Assets for your Performance Max campaigns to get Google Ads to create even better Ads. To find more information about Assets and how to set them up, please follow the steps in this article.

Step 8: Creating listing groups

Lastly, set up your listing tree structure in the Listing Groups tab, within each asset group.

With Shopping Ads, you can add multiple levels of listing groups. You can set up 3 levels of listing groups under the "Listing groups" tab. Listing groups further divide your ad groups into subgroups. When adding a new level of listing groups, you have to select a field from Channable and you have to select which field of your Google Shopping feed this links to.

There are four important things to keep in mind when setting up listing groups:

1. Subdivision fields: Only fields that have been sent through your Google Shopping feed can be used as subdivision fields. Also, make sure the field in your shopping feed for Google contains the same information as in your Shopping Ads setup.
   
   
2. Unique ID: The product ID code that is used in the Shopping campaign needs to be the same as the ID code used in the Google Shopping feed. If this is not the case, your products in the Shopping campaign can't be linked to the product information in your Merchant Center and the products won't show up in the listing group. 
   
   
3. Level of subdivisions: The higher the level of subdivisions, the more specific the field should be for the items. The field "ID", which is unique for every item, should therefore always be the highest subdivision if it is used (so level #3 if you make use of all three listing group levels).
   
   
4. Maximum limit: Google supports up to 1,000 listing groups per asset group in a Performance Max campaign. Next to the listing groups that you configure in Channable, we generate some additional listing groups that are necessary for a valid structure on Google in the background.
   For example: When you set up 1 listing group subdivision for the Unique Item ID, you can only have 998 items per asset group. If you have more than 1 subdivision, keep in mind that this amount might need to be even lower. This depends on how you define your product subdivisions.

Step 9: Preview

Run the Preview to see what will be pushed to Google. We only show the campaign names, asset group names, and the listing groups. You can find the preview of the multiple asset groups in the "Asset groups" tab.