Optimize and Improve Performance Max campaign

Before I jump into optimizing and improving the Google performance max campaign, be ready to dissect the data and be ready with Google Analytics

Not all LPs product revenue

I recently noticed that performance campaign sends a lot of traffic to the home page even though the feed is attached with different product pages. Here is the snapshot of the last 90 days of data.

Here are a few items to notice

  • Performance max campaign has sent around 15% of the traffic just to the home page. That means rest of the landing pages are receiving a combined traffic of 85%
  • However, in this case home page has a very low conversion rate of below 1%. So, here are below action items you can test

A|B test your home page (PMax loves Home page traffic)

Since google love to send the traffic to the home page and home pages usually have a lower conversion rate, try to AB test your home page with different layouts. Even if you are able to increase the conversion rate by 10-20%, that will result in much higher revenue. Here are a few tips to optimize the home page

  • Use heatmap tools such as Microsoft clarity or Hotjar to heatmap your home page
  • Improve the page load time of the home page by using techniques such as script deferring, lazy loading, by removing the amount of heavy images etc.
  • Remove the low engaging sections on the home page such as ‘as featured in’, ‘about the journey’, ‘about the founders’ etc.
  • Make different sections shoppable for example, shoppable instagram feed, shoppable back in stock products, shoppable newly launched products etc.

Exclude irrelevant landing pages (there would be many)

Login to your Google Analytics and pull up the landing pages data for the last 3-6 months. Go through the landing page URLs in details. You might see landing pages which are very low converting. The best way to pull up these data is to sort the landing pages either by conversion rate or by revenue in descending order and you might discover some funny trends. Here are a few examples of those.

Performance max campaign sending traffic to the orders pages. Even if one session costed my $1. My campaign already lost around $4000 on recycling the same traffic. If this traffic was rightly directed to other converting pages and with a ROAS of even just 1.0, the campaign might have yield another $4000 extra revenue.

Here is another example of performance max campaign sending traffic to the blog pages. Imagine the extra revenue these users have brought if redirected to the right pages on the website.

So the moral of the story is, definitely use the URL exclusion rule and continuously keep digging for the funny URLs in Google Analytics that performance max campaign might be driving traffic to. Here is an example of that:

Optimize the assets, key success factor

Here are some tips to optimize the assets

  • Use the images of your best selling products or at least a few top sellers
  • Have clean creatives without much overlap texts or multiple color combos
  • Usually, creatives which work on Facebook, I have seen them working good on Google Performance max campaign too
  • Don’t be shy with other assets such as sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets. Have them ready to the fullest capacity but be wise with where you send your users. For instance, try to send them to the best collection, bundle and save, offers, best products, new launches etc.
  • Re-evaluate the performance of your headline and descriptions from time to time and replace them with something more authentic. I recently replaced some low performing assets including headlines and descriptions and they are in pending state
  • Definitely attach YouTube video ads otherwise, Google will create a few for you and trust me then are not good.

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