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Looking for advice on next step after low-performing pMax campaign
I’ve been running a pMax campaign for about a month now. I’ve edited it a few times, but it’s out of it’s most recent “learning phase” now. Optimized to 100%. I’ve made about 15 sales over that time period, which for a business just starting out isn’t too bad I suppose. For context, I am drop-shipping pond supplies, that are sourced from USA suppliers.
The problem is, I have about 450 products listed at the moment, priced at or below market, and I’m getting lots of clicks to some of them, but the bounce rate is high and my CPC is way over my margins. What seems to be happening is people are clicking my Google Shopping ads, poking around for a second or two, and then leaving. Like window shopping.
So I need to adjust something.
My question is, do I turn off the pMax campaign which is connected to my product feed and create a more traditional display or search ads for less SKUs? I’m hesitant because I don’t want to limit my audience to just a few products (the pond supply category is wide) but as I get further into this it seems like too much bread for the butter and I might just be throwing money at leads with no intention of buying.
Anyway, any helpful thoughts on next steps would be much appreciated.
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1 Reply
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You don’t have tons of sales, which might mean [PMax](https://www.takesomerisk.com/performance-max-campaigns/) will struggle. You might be better off with [standard shopping](https://www.takesomerisk.com/how-to-structure-your-shopping-campaigns/) campaigns. Plus running search ads too.
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Ensure the product titles are optimized and you’re using all the characters possible to fill with descriptive adjectives. Add a customer list audience as a signal to the pmax campaign. Create multiple asset groups for the different themes of pond supplies (if there are themes).
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Do you know the conversion rate per product? In general? Not only pMAX? Limit the pMAX to those products. And to the ones you have high margin.
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You know that you’re meant to have 30 conversions within a 30 day time period before running a smart bidding strategy right? The point is that Google, while I’m sure they would like to think so, have zero idea what your products are or who is interested, they have to gain all of this over time with data.
What you should be doing is starting with a search campaign, and add a regular shopping campaign until you know what is happening. Pmax will blow a lot of money on display which is why you are getting high bounce rates.
I wouldn’t even think about Pmax until you’ve maxed out your search first and foremost, and your shopping after that.
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PMax can be great but from my own experience, they may struggle when the number of references is low. I would recommend to take a look at the products you sold as well as the margin and to keep only those that are profitable in the PMax campaign. Then, create a standard shopping campaign with the remaining products and monitor their performances over the next 3-4 weeks.
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Shopping is for Shopping.
Search is for Buying. -
Sounds what you need to adjust is your landing pages and not the campaign. The platform can only do so much to drive traffic – the purchases rely on the site / lp
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