Setting up feed-based Performance Max Vehicle campaign
This article covers how to set up a feed-based PMax Vehicle campaign in Channable for retail (with a Merchant Center feed).
PMax with a Vehicle feed
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. Learn more
Send your products to Google Merchant Center
When you want to set up a Performance Max campaign, you need to send your product information to Google Merchant Center. Google Merchant Center is the online portal used to send your items to Google Shopping.
Once you've sent your product information to Google Merchant Center, you are ready to create Performance Max campaigns via our Shopping Ads API.
Create 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:
Connect with: The Google Ads connection to which you want to send your Performance Max campaign.
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).
Unique ID per item: A unique ID per product (choose the field that is connected to the ID field in your Google Shopping feed).
Google Merchant ID: The Google Merchant ID in which your Google Shopping feed is imported.
Campaign type: Performance Max Vehicle
Use master rule group (optional): Choose a master rule group. You can use master rule groups to filter certain items from your feed or to set standard values. More information about master rule groups.
Important: You cannot change the campaign type after creation in Channable, so you can only select this once.
Configure Google Ads status & Sync status
After creating a new generator, configure different statuses in the 'Settings' step of the generator. Click on Settings and you will see the saved settings from Step 2 and additional 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 attention to these settings — read this article for an explanation of each possible setting.
Setting up rules
After creating a generator and setting up the Google Ads & Sync status settings, set up rules. To make Performance Max ads 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.
Creating a new Performance Max campaign
Within the campaigns step, set up the basic settings for the campaign. Fill in the following settings:
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.
Example: 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.
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 the country matches your intended sales region.
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.
Target ROAS bidding strategy Under the campaigns tab, you can choose your Target ROAS bidding strategy. In Channable, you can select between two types:
Maximize Conversion Value
Optimize value of sales
Not only conversions
Looks at price to determine which products to promote over others
Custom Target ROAS
Optimizes ad-spend
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.
Creating Asset groups
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 relevant asset groups (e.g., based on categories, brands, or promotions).
To add a new Asset Group generator, click the ‘Add dynamic asset group generator’ button in the 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.
Creating Assets
Use Channable to create Assets for your Performance Max campaigns to help Google Ads create better Ads.
For more information about Assets and setup steps, follow this article.
Creating listing groups
Set up your listing tree structure in the Listing Groups tab, within each asset group.
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, select a field from Channable and select which field of your Google Shopping feed this links to.
Four important notes when setting up listing groups:
Subdivision fields: Only fields that have been sent through your Google Shopping feed can be used as subdivision fields. Make sure the field in your shopping feed for Google contains the same information as in your Shopping Ads setup.
Unique ID: The product ID code used in the Shopping campaign needs to be the same as the ID code used in the Google Shopping feed. If not, 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.
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).
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.
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, this amount may need to be lower depending on how you define your product subdivisions.
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