Performance max campaigns are the main sales driver on many ecommerce PPC accounts. They can occasionally be good for lead generation too.
But they’re a mixed. Highly automated they show you some of the data but hide parts. They don’t give many control levers and can be a pain to manage at scale.
When they came out, there were barely any insights, but Google Ads are gradually adding them ( though arguably not enough).
One thing that we can see in pMAX campaigns is search term insights. Let's have a look at what they are, how to find them and how to analyse this data.
With a focus on “privacy” Google has restricted the level of detail we’re used to. Search term categories allow us to glimpse at what users have searched but not necessarily specific clicks like we used to in search and shopping campaigns.
We can get a good general sense of what driving traffic and sales in the campaign. Please note that it’ll take around a week for search terms insights to appear in a new performance max campaign.
In typical Google fashion, the data’s there, you just have to dig deep to find it. Here are the 3 ways you can look at this data.
The default view is very basic. Google has added a new source column, however that's come at the expense of conversions. You can choose the time period but the level of data is very basic and pretty useless to be honest.
I recommend always clicking the detailed report option to view more insights.
The detailed view is much more useful giving insights about clicks, conversions, conversion value and conversion rate. It doesn't give costs information so you don't really know how much you've paid for these clicks but you get a good sense of what's working and what isn't.
Each search categories opens up to reveal the search terms within it.
Each search category can be opened into actual search terms giving you specific information about what users typed into Google before clicking your ad.
Ultimately, the best way to review your search terms in Performance Max is by exporting them from the detailed report to a Google sheet.
Once the data’s in the sheet, set a filter and arrange by conversions to find the search terms with the highest number of conversions. The export does a good job of revealing all the search terms within the categories so you can look at more meaningful insights. Some clicks have the search term hidden and you can filter out to not see clicks without a search term.
The most detailed way to view search terms is by exporting them to a Google sheet where you can easily arrange and filter.
When looking in any campaign, I would typically look for the following:
You can use the filters in Google sheet to discover all of these. If you're not targeting the highly converting terms in search, then it might be a good opportunity to add them and see how they perform.
If you're using negative keywords in performance Max then you can try to exclude some of the poorly converting search terms, especially if they're getting a lot of clicks.
Even though the data is limited there are some great insights to be behind from performance max search terms. To get the most I recommend looking at the detailed view, or even better, exporting it to a Google sheet.
While you do have limited options of what you can actually do with this data inside Performance Max campaigns you can use this for your search campaigns and also excluded with negative keywords.
We’re a PPC agency specialising in e-commerce performance marketing and lead generation. Our core strength is Google Ads and we help brands grow on this platform. We also offer PPC audits.
If you have any Google Ads or marketing questions, reach out to us and we’ll be glad to help.
Odi Caspi
Founder - HappyPPC