Take Back Control Of Your Google Ads Performance Max Campaign with These Secret pMax Insights

If you’re using Performance Max (pMax) campaigns, you might have noticed that it’s challenging to gain insights on where your budget has been spent. The lack of transparency can be frustrating, and if you’re not careful, Google can spend all your budget on low-quality placements on the Display Network and YouTube.

The good news is that some bright minds in PPC have developed a solution to this problem. Mike Rhodes, from AgencySavvy, has created a script that can provide you with valuable insights into your pMax spending. While it’s not perfect, it can help you take back control of your campaign spending and optimize it for better performance.

In this article, we’ll explore how to use Mike Rhodes’ pMax spend allocation script to gain insights, identify trends, and create an action plan. Let’s dig in!

How to Use the pMax Spend Allocation Script

Mike Rhodes’ pMax spend allocation script creates graphs and tables that visualize your spend on three networks:

1. Shopping
2. Video
3. Other

With this script, you can quickly see where Google has spent your pMax campaign budget, identify trends, and create an action plan based on the insights.

While the script is not perfect, it can still provide you with valuable insights. For example, the Shopping cost is extracted from listing groups, which is linked to your Merchant Center ID. This could include Dynamic Remarketing data. Additionally, the “Other” data can be a combination of Search, Discovery, Display, Gmail, Maps, and more. It would be nice to see the split between those networks, but it’s not possible (yet).

Despite its imperfections, the script can still provide you with valuable insights. Let’s take a look at a case study to see how we used it.

Case Study: Analyzing pMax Spending on Video Placements

The return on ad spend (ROAS) for this campaign was below our target, so we used the insights from the script to identify two options:

1. Optimize video assets
2. Revert back to a feed-only pMax setup
3. Pause this pMax campaign and launch Standard Shopping

We decided to revert back to a feed-only pMax setup. However, this didn’t improve performance as much as we hoped, so we paused the pMax campaign and created a Standard Shopping campaign for this specific product category.

(It’s okay to use Standard Shopping campaigns, too!)

The initial results look good, but it’s still too early to say whether it was successful or not. If the results continue to improve, we might create a case study and inform you of the performance uplift (or not) in a later issue of The PPC Edge.

This case study illustrates that pMax is not perfect, and it’s important to gain insights and take action based on the data. Normally, we see 1-10% of spend on video placements, so it was strange to see one campaign spend 60%+ of the budget on video. However, with Mike Rhodes’ script, we were able to identify the issue and take action to optimize our campaign.

Set Up the Script in Your Account

If you’re using pMax campaigns, we highly recommend setting up Mike Rhodes’ pMax spend allocation script in

 

Link to the script (account-level by Mike Rhodes)

Link to the script (MCC-level by Luuk Fiets)