Shopping campaigns are not old news. Here’s how they can support your Performance Max activity…

Are Shopping campaigns old news? It might be easy to think so when Google is heavily developing automated products such as Performance Max and Demand Gen. Whilst Performance Max has delivered excellent results for many of the clients we work with, we have discovered that it’s not always great at picking up all the traffic available. This means you could be leaving revenue on the table.

We’re not going to suggest not using Performance Max. As we’ve said, we have seen excellent results from this campaign format. But regardless of that, there is no getting around the fact that Google is heavily investing in Performance Max (and Demand Gen), and not investing in the Shopping campaign product. If you’re not using Performance Max now, you’re going to be left behind. However, that doesn’t mean Shopping campaigns don’t have a place, and we’ve done a lot of testing over the course of this year to measure the uplift this can have.

What did we do?

We ran a 3 month test, from June to August, with both Performance Max and Shopping running. The duration of the test allowed us to capture sufficient data across multiple regions and clients. The results of which have been very positive.

For one of our clients, operating in multiple territories, using Shopping as a supportive campaign to Performance Max led to:

• +12% revenue for the UK
• +19% revenue in Germany

These weren’t isolated results either, on a completely separate client targeting the UK, we saw +5% conversions from a non-branded shopping campaign.

What specific set up do you need to implement to make this happen?

Performance Max will automatically have priority over your Shopping campaign so, in theory, the former will always be served over the latter. As a result, we always set the priority of our Shopping campaigns to ‘High’, ensuring we maximise the chance of it picking up any traffic that could be lost by Performance Max.

As well as that, we always set the Target ROAS to no more or less than we would set for any of the Performance Max campaigns. Otherwise, machine learning could easily get confused around which to use.

And it’s as simple as that. Give this a try to get uplift from you Performance Max campaigns.