Performance max agency

Performance Max optimises towards whatever conversion action you give it, so a wrong or double-counted purchase event teaches it the wrong lesson from day one. We check that the purchase conversion fires once per order, carries the right value and currency, and matches your store's order count within a reasonable gap. If enhanced conversions or new-customer values are available in your setup, we switch them on, because the campaign can then be told to value a new customer above a returning one. Only after this is clean do we build anything.

A Performance Max campaign left alone will show for searches that include your brand, and those sales would mostly have happened anyway. We put brand terms in their own small Search campaign, add brand exclusions to Performance Max, and where the account allows it set the campaign to prefer new customers. This makes the reported return on Performance Max look worse and makes it true. Once you can see what a new customer actually costs, the decision about how much to spend is a real one.

Products with different margins need different targets, so we group the catalogue by margin using custom labels in the feed and give each band its own campaign and budget. Inside each campaign, asset groups follow the categories a shopper would recognise, each with its own images, headlines, descriptions and, where you have it, video. Listing groups tie each asset group to the right products. The result is a structure where a change to a target affects one kind of product, not the whole store.

A target return set too high starves the campaign; one set too low lets it spend on anything. We calculate the break-even return from the margin of the products in each campaign, set the target a little above it, and leave it alone for long enough to settle. Changing targets every few days resets the learning and hides whether the campaign was working. Budget increases come in steps, after a period at the current level shows the return holds.

Performance Max reports less than Standard Shopping, but it is not blind. Search categories, asset group performance, product-level sales in Merchant Center, and the placement report all exist and get read. What Google will not tell you, we work out from your own data: how many of the orders came from new customers, which products drove the revenue, and what the margin on those orders was. The monthly note you receive is built from both, and it is written in plain language.