Performance Max campaigns for most e-shops are already up and running but Smart Shopping campaigns are still eligible, that is until the end of September. Google had a few planning stages and we are through a few of them. Right now they are in the process of automatic upgrades of the Smart Shopping campaigns. This should be finished at the end of September and you won’t be able to use your Smart Shopping campaigns anymore.

Is the automatic upgrade good and are Performance Max campaigns good for you?

Smart Shopping campaigns were really great and innovated online advertisement a lot. Most of the sales came from them and the results were really great. They required less optimization and were more versatile than text ads and product text ads.

If you want to use only Shopping campaigns you should start thinking about creating Standard Shopping campaigns. They will still be operational but they also require more handling than Smart Shopping campaigns did.

We are constantly learning more about the Performance Max campaigns, but from what we have seen as of right now we have a few tips for you:

1. Your daily budget has to be proportionate to the number of products that are being advertised → If you have too many products and not enough cash to cover them, the data will be gathered much slower, and not all products will be advertised.

2. If you have a bigger budget you can, of course, advertise more through the Performance Max campaigns but even then you should choose categories of products that are being sold the best → increase budgets gradually and add more products.

3. If you have a low budget start with Standard Shopping campaigns and gradually increase it. Include only best-sold products and as time goes on add a few more products and increase budgets accordingly → when you reach certain sales move those products to the Performance Max campaign and add products that perform worse to the Standard Shopping campaign.

4. Right now your Performance Max campaign doesn’t need a filled-out asset setting so you can use it as a Smart Shopping campaign. Is it a Smart Shopping campaign? Not at all but it functions like one most of the time. If this setting works worse than your old Smart Shopping campaign consider switching to the Standard Shopping campaign.

5. With Smart Shopping campaigns gone Dynamic remarketing is still an option! You can still use a combination of Standard Shopping campaigns and Dynamic remarketing. To set it follow this chain:

1. Sign in to Google Ads.
2. Click Campaigns from the page menu.
3. Click the plus icon, then select New campaign.
4. Select Sales as your campaign goal.
5. Select Display as the campaign type.
6. Provide the URL address of your e-shop.
7. Enter a name for the campaign.
8. Click Continue.
9. Enter your budget and bidding details, then click Next.
10. On the “Campaign settings” page, click More settings.
11. Expand the “Dynamic ads” section, then click Use dynamic ads feed for personalized ads.
12. You might have to connect the Merchant center account for this.
13. Use the drop-down menu to select a business type for your feed. For example, if you’re remarketing shoes, choose Retail.
14. In the “Targeting” section, select your targeting options.
15. Create your responsive display ads.
16. Click Create campaign.
You are all set and ready to advertise.

We are sure that there are more tips that we could include but those are some that are the most important in the given situation. In the future, we just might write an entire article with a bunch of tips and tricks 🙂

How can you upgrade your Smart Shopping campaigns manually?

Right now you can still upgrade your Smart Shopping campaigns manually, but that can all change very quickly. It’s better if you upgrade manually just because of the control you have over the migration.

Take into consideration that the data you had on Smart Shopping campaigns might be lost as soon as you upgrade the campaigns. We recommend documenting at least a few months of results from Smart Shopping campaigns before you migrate to Performance Max just so that you can see if Performance Max campaigns work similarly to your old Smart Shopping campaigns.

Right now is the right time to decide which way to go and to test a few alternatives. If you are not ready for the winter holiday season you might suffer great losses.

The notifications about upgrading to Performance Max campaigns can pop up in a few places:

1. Notifications – bell icon:

2. Recommendations page:

3. Inline recommendations:

4. Campaigns table:

5. Informations bar:

We would like to thank Google support for providing us with the pictures. Remember, if you have problems with the migration or if you don’t know what you should do contact the Google Ads support team or us directly and both parties would be happy to assist you with anything and everything 🙂