Optimising P.Max for Peak Performance for CV Villas

Controlling the black box and harnessing automation without losing control on search

Managing Google Ads Performance Max (PMax) is complex due to its black box nature, automatic expansion, and limited data availability. Therefore keeping it on target, spending specific amounts on different desired product groups, and also serving relevant ads to the right people requires proper planning and structure of campaigns.

What we did

Creative optimisation

Search term control

Search cannibalisation prevention

Market-specific targeting

The results

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more clicks

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more leads

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lower CPL

The challenge

Getting one P.Max campaign to spend to a target within target performance goals is relatively easy. However, getting many to spend across different region groups, each with their own performance and budget targets, all while without cannibalising core search terms is a different challenge. We also wanted P.Max to serve dynamic urls, images and ad copy for each product on the site, making the balance of control and automation more difficult.

Our approach

After initial testing to confirm P.Max’s potential, we implemented a granular structure with campaigns per country, each with region-specific asset groups containing tailored audiences, images, videos and ad copy; getting an excellent ad status is a minimum. Next, we made sure audiences were detailed and unique for each region by leveraging CRM data, interests, remarketing, demographics and search terms. Our P.Max search term script enabled deeper search term reporting than Google provided and improved negative management. Country and region negative keywords and URL restrictions helped focus to search term expansion and limited automated url expansion to targeted regions, while still enabling unique landing pages for 1000s of Villas.

On top of the core asset group creative, we integrated region specific dynamic remarketing, image feed for further creative performance, and a page feed to make sure that any new villas on site were immediately added into the ads. This is as well as updating the core asset group assets each season. Google’s new brand exclusion lists combined with manual brand and generic negatives helped by the script, kept PMax focused on upper-funnel acquisition, matching to country and region specific terms while preventing overlap with dedicated brand and generic search campaigns.

The impact

By leveraging segmentation and strategic automation controls, we successfully lowered CPA by 24% YoY while driving controlled targeted growth in key areas with 488% more leads YoY from P.Max. We achieved this YoY growth during CV Villas peak period, and against what was already a high spending format for CV Villas the previous year. The approach allowed us to scale efficiently without restricting PMax’s strengths, ensuring automation continued to optimise performance. P.Max is now regularly outperforming our core search travel campaigns by reaching new users further up the funnel across platforms within our clients targets.