In this overview, we will explain how to set up Performance Max campaigns while using the Producthero Advertising (performance based segmentation) labels.

Watch our video explaining how to do this, or follow the steps in this guide.

Topics covered in this guide:

How to create a new Performance Max campaign
1. Select campaign objective
2. Bidding
3. Campaign settings
4. Asset group
5. Budget
6. Summary
Change an existing campaign into a Producthero campaign
1. Edit

1. How to create a new Performance Max campaign

1.1. Select campaign objective

Go to the Google Ads dashboard and start a new ad campaign. Select a suitable campaign objective, “Sales” in this illustration.
After selecting sales, we are going for “Purchases” as the conversion goal.
Set your campaign to Performance Max.
Select your Merchant Center account and country where you sell your products. After that, enter your campaign name including the name of the label. We suggest including the country, campaign type and name of the label in the campaign name.
1. In this example, we will call it “Heroshop_PMax_Villains”.

1.2. Bidding

The next step is selecting the bidding strategy which is in this situation “Conversion Value”. You have the option to select the checkbox “Set a target return on ad spend” and enter your target amount.

Best Practice: It is highly recommended to set the same ROAS goal for your Producthero segmentation labels campaigns.

Not doing this may result in poor performance.

In this example, the target ROAS of 500%, is set to 2 campaigns.

1.3. Campaign Settings

Location & Languages

Start by selecting the location to target. In this example, we are just going to target the Netherlands, but if you want to target specific places within a location, select “Nearby” and click on “Target or Exclude locations”.
Select the language you want your ads to serve in. Google suggests languages that might be useful for the location you are going to target. In this example, we have only selected Dutch while Google also advises to use English.

Automatically created assets: text assets and Final URL

Best practice: Turn off automatically created assets

Why? When Final URL expansion is turned on, Google can replace the Final URL with a landing page it deems most relevant to the user search query and intent. However, in practice, this can lead to Google selecting irrelevant pages. Therefore, we recommend turning Final URL expansion off, so that the landing pages of the Merchant Center are being used.

1.4. Asset Group

The next step is building your asset group. Here you can manage your assets (ads+creatives) and the targeting of your products in the listing group (product group).

Name

This campaign will consist of the “Villains” products, so we will create an asset group with only these products. This can be done as follows.

First, name your asset group. In this situation we will call it “Villains”.

Listing group

Then, click on the expand button of “Listing group” and click on all products to select the Custom Label on which you have set the Producthero Advertising labels (you can check your Custom Label in the Produchthero Platform by clicking on the button “Feed Settings”). In this example, the labels are set on Custom Label 4. So, we select this Custom Label and then we select the “Villains” products.

Assets

In an asset group, you can manage assets such as headlines, descriptions, images, videos, logos, and URL. If you don’t add a video, Google will create one for you based on the images and text you provided.

Best practice: Don’t add assets so that your campaign will only serve in the Shopping network.

Why? Take back control of how much you want to spend on different channels. We recommend creating a dedicated Search campaign or an assets only (no MC Feed) campaign. In this way, you are still serving on multiple channels, but you are in control of the ad spend.

So, we are going to skip this part, and scroll down.

Signals

Audience Signals are optional and are meant to jumpstart the campaign. With the correct audience signal, you can push the algorithm of Google in the right direction. After that, Performance Max will optimize the campaign itself.

Add search themes and audience signals if you have any.

1.5. Budget

When setting the daily budget you have to take two things into account.

When you add ad assets, you might want to increase the budget as you will target via multiple channels.
When creating different campaigns for different labels, you don’t want to allocate the same budget to each campaign.

Note: It is important to keep on monitoring your campaign budget after the launch of the campaigns.

1.6. Review and publish campaign

Do one final review of your campaign to make sure everything is configured correctly and publish it!

2. How to change an existing campaign into a Producthero campaign

In this part, we will explain step by step how you can change your current Performance Max campaign(s) into Producthero label campaigns.

Steps:

Implement the campaign structure in the Listing Group of each campaign
Creating “products only” Performance Max campaigns
Turn Automatically created assets (text assets & Final URL expansion) off
Set the budget & and target ROAS according to the best practices of Producthero

2.1. Implement the campaign structure in the Listing Group of each campaign

Campaign 1 should contain all products except for the products with the Villains label (= Heroes, Sidekicks and Zombies)
Campaign 2 should only contain the products with the Villains label.

In order to do this, the Listing Group of the Asset group (of each campaign) should be changed.

How the Listing Group of the Heroes, Sidekicks, Zombies campaign should look:

How the Listing Group of the Villains campaign should look:

2.2. Creating “products only” Performance Max campaigns

Best practice: Don’t add assets so that your campaign will only serve in the Shopping network.

Assets are added in an Asset Group. It isn’t possible to remove assets from an Asset Group, but it is possible to pause Asset Groups.

Pause the Asset Group that contains Assets and creates a new Asset Group without adding assets.

2.3. Turn Automatically created assets (text assets & Final URL expansion) off

Go to campaign settings to turn this off:

2.4. Set the budget & and target ROAS according to the best practices of Producthero

Why set the same target ROAS and different budgets for the Producthero label campaigns?

To steer the algorithm of Google in your favour
- By setting the same target ROAS in Google Ads, and by giving different budgets to each campaign, you can influence the bids on search terms (specific/generic). For your good performing products (Heroes & Sidekicks) the same target ROAS will be easier to achieve compared to your bad performing products (Villains).

Make the Producthero target ROAS work as it should (not to confuse with the target ROAS you set within Google Ads)
- The Producthero target ROAS can be set in the Labelizer Wizard. It determines whether your products will become a hero/sidekick or villain/zombie.

More information can be found in this article:

Set the same taget ROAS for your Shopping Ad campaigns using the labelizer strategy

The campaign structure looks like this:

Campaign	Budget	Target ROAS
1. Heroes/Sidekicks/Zombies	High budget	Same target ROAS
2. Villains	Low budget	Same target ROAS