My winning Performance Max account structure

If you want 2023 to be the year where you successfully scale your eCommerce business with Google Ads, you need to make sure that you are using the correct Performance Max structure.

Since, Google Ads threw away smart shopping and pushed everyone to Performance Max there Youtube has been a melting pot of people throwing around different ideas and strategies for what works and what doesn’t work. 

But like every type of Google Ads campaign type success is not found in some secret strategies that no-one else is using.

Success is found by FIRSTLY understanding how the campaign works and THEN using the correct structure and optimisations to increase the performance of your account every month.

Because, like the account I just showed you, they did not go from a ROAS of 2.2 to 7 in 30 days. It took month-on-month improvements to build up to 7x plus results.

So in this video, I am going to take you through the data-driven account structure that works for Performance Max campaigns.

And the good news is that this structure works regardless of your budget. The example I am showing you today is of a smaller brand that started with a budget of $1,500 per month and now spends $5k a month. However, this is the structure that I also use for my larger clients with budgets of up to $200k a month. 

For success with Performance Max you need to understand not only how this campaign works but the different elements within the campaign. 

The core difference between Performance Max and other campaigns like search or shopping campaigns is that Performance Max campaigns are NOT purely based on intent-based search terms.

So for search & shopping campaigns, your ads will only trigger when someone completes a search enquiry that is relevant to your product or matches one of your targeted Keywords.

Because Performance Max is NOT only intent based as it also:

• Targets people who have never heard of your brand or are not even currently looking for your product
• And then also will remarket and target them after an initial contact point with one of your ads or website.

This is why your acquisition windows for Performance Max are a lot longer, with some products having an acquisition window of up to 3-4 weeks.

So remember, with Performance Max that you may not see any conversions for the first 30 days, which is different to Search & Shopping campaigns as they are only targeting people who are currently searching for your products. 

So now that you understand how Performance Max is different to search & shopping campaigns, the next important step is to make sure that you are using the correct campaign structure.

The biggest understanding being that you should ALWAYS set up Performance Max campaigns with Asset groups based around product categories and NOT audiences.

So the most important thing with your Performance Max structure is to remember that your:

• Campaign is based on a Product Category
• Which includes Asset groups that are focussed on product groups within that core product category - not different groups of audiences & keywords because when you add these Performance Max goes beyond your selections to find new conversions anyway.

This then allows you to set up and create your asset groups in the correct way by having targeted ad copy & images for each of your different product groups.

Using the correct structure for your Performance Max campaign is the starting point, BUT to make sure that you have continued success, you need to optimise your campaign in the right way.

To help you with this, I want to give you access to my Google Ads eCommerce optimisation checklist. This checklist lets you know what you need to optimise in your Performance Max campaign and can be accessed in the video description below.