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Setting up feed-based Performance Max campaigns for Retail

Performance Max (Pmax) campaigns let advertisers access all Google Ads inventory through a single campaign, making it easier to achieve goals across the Google Network. For more on Performance Max, visit this page.

This article covers how to set up a feed-based Pmax campaign in Channable for retail (with a Merchant Center feed)

Table of contents

  1. Channable Performance Max types
  2. Send your products to Google Merchant Center
  3. Creating a new Dynamic Shopping Ads generator
  4. Configure Google Ads status & Sync status
  5. Setting up rules
  6. Creating a new Performance Max campaign
  7. Creating Asset groups
  8. Creating Assets
  9. Creating listing groups
  10. Preview

Performance Max Types Explained

In Channable, we divide them into three types:

  • PMax Retail (full walkthrough video): Designed for e-commerce businesses, these campaigns use a product feed from Google Merchant Center to automatically create ads, primarily in Shopping formats. Google pulls product details such as images, descriptions, and prices directly from your feed, with options to add extra assets. This setup is ideal for showcasing products and driving sales.
  • PMax Non-Retail (full walkthrough video): Non-Retail campaigns don’t require a product feed. Instead, you manually add assets like headlines, descriptions, images, and videos, making them suitable for local service providers (e.g., plumbers, gyms), travel companies (e.g., airlines), and businesses without an online product inventory. This type is effective for generating leads, building brand awareness, or driving traffic. For instructions on setting up a Non-Retail feed, refer to this article.
  • PMax with a Vehicle feed (More information): These campaigns are for car dealerships or automotive businesses and use a product feed from Google Merchant Center to automatically create ads across Google's network. This setup helps you reach potential buyers at every stage of their journey, whether you’re focused on driving leads or boosting visits to your dealership. For instructions on setting up a Vehicle feed, refer to this article.

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 using Channable: both options are explained in this article. Once you've sent your product information to Google Merchant Center, you are ready to 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
  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.
Important: You cannot change the campaign type after creation in Channable, so you can only select this once.

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: 

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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

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

1. Campaign Name

You can set the campaign name as either a static value or use a dynamic field from your import. Using a dynamic field allows you to generate multiple Google shopping campaigns from the same generator.

Note that Channable will connect to already existing campaigns that have the same title in both Channable and Google.

For instance, if you have a campaign template named "[brand] shoes" where [brand] is dynamic, Channable might generate campaigns like Adidas shoes and Nike shoes. If you already have a campaign named Nike shoes on Google, Channable will connect to it. Otherwise, it will create a new campaign, like Adidas shoes, if one doesn’t already exist.

2. Campaign Country

After naming your campaign, select the campaign country from the drop-down list. This selection represents the country of sale, not targeting. Ensure that the country matches your intended sales region.

3. Daily Budget

Choose a daily budget in the local currency of your account. Set an amount based on your advertising goals and the maximum you're comfortable spending each day.

4. Target ROAS Bidding Strategy

Under the campaigns tab, you can choose your Target ROAS bidding strategy. In Channable, you can select between two types:

  1. Maximize Conversion Value
    • Optimize Value of sales
    • Not only conversions
    • Looks at price to determine which products to promote over others
  2. Custom Target ROAS 
    • Optimizes Ad-spent
    • Optimizes to meet ROAS goal
    • Can be used to boost sales of product categories
    • Can be used to boost the visibility of product categories
    • Can be used to do promotions

When using the Custom Target ROAS strategy, you will also need to set a Target ROAS value. 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.

Important: You can use a maximum of 100 asset groups per campaign. 

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.