One of the biggest challenges in performance marketing is successfully scaling your campaigns. In other words, can you increase the budget so that the performance is still good and your campaigns are profitable?

This task is difficult enough. But how does ithis work with Performance Max (PMax) campaigns in Google Ads?

You’ll find the answer in this post. I’ll show you how to scale the fully automated campaign type correctly and exceed your sales targets.

That was the short answer. However, there are a lot more details about scaling that you should know. You’ll find everything you need in this post. Here is an overview:

When is scaling actually successful?

At the beginning of the post, I would like to discuss the objective of scaling a campaign and the consequences of this. Because you must have the right expectations.

When scaling a campaign, the aim is to increase the reach in such a way that more conversions are generated and the campaign performance is still within the target range.

In concrete terms, this means increasing the budget and thus the impressions and clicks and thus also achieving more conversions at an acceptable ROAS (return on ad spend) or CPA (cost per action).

If you decide to scale your campaign, you should therefore expect it to become less efficient. This is quite normal.

During the scaling process, performance can also decrease significantly at times. However, you should not prematurely pause your campaign and reverse the changes. This is because the Google algorithm needs time to adapt to new budgets.

After a certain amount of time, the performance should settle into the desired target range. If this is not the case, you can then decide whether to reduce the budget again.

Scaling has its limits

No matter at what scale you operate, there is always a limit to scaling, beyond which more money does not lead to more results. Sometimes it can even be the case that you spend more money and your performance still declines.

Another goal when scaling is therefore to reach the level where you achieve the best possible number of conversions while still meeting your CPA or ROAS targets.

You can find more tips on how to do this in this post:
Optimizing Performance Max campaigns

Let’s take a look at how to scale PMax campaigns…

Scaling PMax campaigns – step-by-step guide

When scaling PMax campaigns, there is a process that has proven to be very effective. It is important not to make too many changes at once, otherwise, the PMax algorithm will start a new learning phase.

You can find more information about the learning phase in this post: Performance Max learning phase

With small changes, you can also better control whether the performance is developing in the right direction.

1. Wait for the learning phase to complete

The learning phase is essential for the AI-based PMax campaign. During this time, the algorithm tests a great deal and learns how and with which ads the ideal target audience is reached.

According to Google itself, this phase lasts around 6 weeks or 45 days. After this time, your campaign will have collected enough data to achieve the best potential from your offer and your advertising media from now on.

This means that you can only really evaluate the campaign starting after about 6 weeks.

Until then, it is best not to make any changes to the campaign at all.

Otherwise, the learning phase will be extended or even start all over again.

It is therefore important to set up your campaigns correctly right from the start and to structure the asset groups the right way.

2. Increase the campaign budget if the results are consistently good

Before you increase your budget, you should be sure that the PMax campaign delivers consistent and acceptable results over a longer period of at least 2 weeks.

It is important that there are no major fluctuations and that the campaign achieves your goals or misses them by a maximum of 20%. If this is the case, you can increase the campaign budget by 15-20%.

3. Monitor development and increase the budget further if necessary

After you have increased the budget, it is important to monitor the performance development. If the campaign continues to perform consistently and is at most approx. 20% below your targets, you can increase the budget again by 15-20%.

How long you should monitor your changes depends somewhat on the budget level. More budget naturally leads to more data and therefore to a faster learning effect for Google’s AI. Therefore, with higher daily budgets, you can increase the budget further after a shorter period of time.

As a rule of thumb:

• Up to $50/day: observation period of 2-3 weeks until you can increase the budget again.

• From $100/day: 1-2 weeks

• From $500/day: From a very high daily budget, you can often increase the budget again after an even shorter period of time. However, I would still recommend that you wait at least a week.

4. Scale until your goal or the limit is reached

Repeat the above process until one of the following two events has occurred:

1. You have reached your conversion goal: You are now achieving the desired number of conversions and the performance is still within the target range. From this point on, you should no longer increase the budget but rather try to achieve the same goal while spending less money.
   
   
2. More budget does not lead to more conversions: As mentioned earlier, at some point you will reach a limit where your additional costs are not worth it. If you observe this over a longer period of time, you should stop scaling and reduce your budget again.

5 tips for successful scaling

Successfully scaling your account often requires a little more than gradually increasing the budget of your PMax campaigns. I would like to show you 5 valuable tips for this.

These go beyond the scope of individual PMax campaigns. Because in the end, of course, it’s the results that count and not how we achieve them.

1. Complementary campaigns in parallel with Performance Max

In many cases, it makes sense to split your budget between different campaign types. Especially if you use Performance Max, a campaign type that gives you a little more control can be a valuable addition.

You should always bear in mind that PMax campaigns cover the entire Google network and are therefore also in competition with the supplementary campaigns. If set up correctly, however, this has no negative effects.

The following campaign types are suitable and have proven their worth:

• Dynamic search campaigns (DSA): This campaign type is particularly suitable for e-commerce. To have more control over the search results of your products and categories, it is recommended to create a supplementary dynamic search campaign for each PMax campaign.
  
  It is important that you view both campaigns as a unit. This is because the performance of the DSA can be inconsistent, as Google fluctuates back and forth between the PMax and DSA in terms of search traffic.
  
  These fluctuations are normal and not a problem. In the long term, you can use this setup to better control your scaling and achieve better results overall.
  
  

• Best-performing search campaigns: Another good addition is a search campaign that only contains the best keywords or search terms from your PMax campaign.
  
  Here you should enter the keywords as a broad match and use the automated bidding strategy Maximize Conversions with a target CPA.
  
  You should set this target CPA at approx. 20% above your actual target so that you don’t limit your campaign too much.
  
  

• YouTube Ads: YouTube is a very good channel to reach new, “cold” target audiences. Especially if you have big scaling goals, it is important to find new potential customers.
  
  So if you have good videos at your hand, YouTube ads are a great addition. However, they do not function purely as a conversion machine. You should therefore be aware that this type of campaign will not have the strongest performance but is can still be beneficial to increase your reach.
  
  When creating the campaign, you should use the best keywords or search terms and the best target audiences from the PMax campaigns to address people who are relevant to your offer.
  

2. Analyze and optimize your website

With PMax campaigns, you can define a final URL for each asset group, but Google can decide by default which landing page users are directed to after clicking your ads. Because if you don’t deactivate it, Google will use the URL expansion.

This means that Google scans your entire website and decides where a user is sent after clicking on an ad based on the content on the individual pages.

If you also use automatically generated text assets from Google (also activated by default), additionally, ad copy is created based on your website texts.

A high-quality website with good content is therefore extremely important for successful PMax campaigns – especially if you want to scale.

It is therefore best to check and optimize your website before you increase your budget.

3. Also use other channels for retargeting

Scaling your campaigns leads to growing website traffic. At a certain point, these are also “cold” target audiences who may have their first point of contact with your brand.

In order to scale successfully, it is extremely important to keep these people engaged and gradually bring them to converting by retargeting them.

You can use Google Remarketing for this – PMax campaigns also use remarketing automatically. However, you should look beyond the boundaries of the Google cosmos and also address your website visitors on other channels.

Possible channels:

• Email marketing

• Meta retargeting

• LinkedIn retargeting

Scaling should be considered holistically. Don’t forget to utilize the potential of other channels.

The last two tips relate more to the specific PMax campaign that you want to scale…

4. Control your brand traffic

This tip is particularly useful if you represent a strong brand with a lot of search volume.

PMax campaigns exploit every opportunity to generate conversions. This often means that search queries containing your brand name account for a large proportion of the campaign traffic.

However, this is not always a good thing. Because if someone is already searching for your brand name, they might land on your website and convert even without paid ads.

If you scale your PMax campaigns, Google may bid even more aggressively on your own brand name without you gaining much of an advantage.

For this reason, it is important to regularly check the search terms of your campaigns and exclude your brand name if necessary. You can then bid on your brand traffic in a more controlled way in your own search and/or shopping campaign.

5. Check your product performance

When scaling e-commerce PMax campaigns, it is important that you also regularly check your product performance.

After the learning phase, the Google algorithm often focuses on a few products that sell well. With the increased budget, it can then happen that the costs for poorly performing products increase.

This has an impact on the overall campaign results.

For this reason, you should regularly check the listing groups and the single product performance. Pay attention to high costs for products or product groups that lead to below-average results. Exclude these from your campaign.

Conclusion: Scaling PMax campaigns correctly

I hope I was able to help you with this post. You should take the following points with you:

• Increase the budget by a maximum of 15-20% and give the algorithm time

• See scaling as an investment and don’t expect the same costs per conversion straight away

• Take a holistic view of scaling and use other campaign types and channels to support your measures

Thank you for reading this article. I hope scaling your campaigns works the way you wish to!

Work smart – Clicks in Mind