Best way to structure PMax campaign?
Hey everyone, been running a single pmax campaign with a years worth of data.
Looking to put together a better strategy. I have around 3000 skus, shopping feed is my main conversion point. How would you structure this?
The short answer is:
With 3000 SKUs and a year’s worth of data, the best way to structure your Performance Max campaigns is to segment your SKUs into relevant groups based on attributes like margin, price point, or best sellers, and then create a dedicated PMax campaign for each group, using listing groups to only include the specific SKUs.
For the long term, focus on enhancing your conversion data quality by moving your purchase tracking to server side using Google Tag Manager and a service like Stape or Google Cloud Platform, while also utilizing the Google Ads API to automate feed updates and campaign management as your structure grows, giving you a powerful, scalable, and low-cost setup.
The long answer is:
Given your high SKU count and reliance on the shopping feed, you’re at the point where a single PMax campaign is severely limiting your control and ability to optimize.
You need to segment your product catalog.
The ideal structure involves creating multiple PMax campaigns, with each campaign targeting a specific grouping of your 3000 SKUs.
Segmentation should be based on business goals – think high-margin products, best sellers, high-priced items, or even category based groupings.
In each new PMax campaign, you use the listing groups feature to strictly include only the SKUs that belong to that specific segment.
This gives you the control to set different Target ROAS (tROAS) goals and allocate budgets based on the strategic importance of each product group.
You should also ensure that your conversion tracking is robust and accurate, as this is the lifeblood of PMax.
Moving your conversion tracking to server side using Google Tag Manager and a service like Stape or Google Cloud Platform is an excellent, cheap, and scalable solution.
Server-side tracking significantly improves the accuracy of events like purchase, add_to_cart, and view_item by reducing browser-side limitations and ad blockers, giving PMax a cleaner signal to optimize against.
This setup is generally cheap because the initial costs of setting up the server-side environment on a platform like Stape’s managed infrastructure or on your own Google Cloud Platform account are minimal, especially when compared to the increased campaign performance you’ll see.
Finally, as you move to a multi-campaign structure, managing 3000 SKUs and numerous listing groups manually becomes a time sink.
This is where the Google Ads API comes in as an excellent, low-cost solution.
The Google Ads API allows you to programmatically manage your product feed, update campaign settings, and modify listing groups.
Instead of manually creating and updating hundreds of listing groups across multiple PMax campaigns, you can write scripts – or use third-party tools that leverage the API – to automate these tasks based on your inventory or performance data.
Since the API is free to use, your only cost is the development time or the subscription to a tool, making it highly efficient for managing large-scale operations and ensuring your complex PMax structure remains perfectly aligned with your business strategy without incurring high recurring service fees.
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