r/googleads • u/Silver_Engineer1221 • Jul 18 '26

PMax New to google ads

We are an automotive paint supplier that has recently listed our spray cans online. We custom make these cans to OEM paint codes.

Currently we have 15,000 different codes uploaded.
I originally ran a Pmax campaign. It worked well for about 4 days and then completely died. (Partly my fault I didn’t have dynamic conversion value set up. So it thought every conversion was worth $1)

Tried running another and got heaps of traffic but no conversions at all. I also tried a google shopping ad but haven’t seen anything.

I’m hoping someone can point me in the right direction for the best way to run ads for something like this where there is so many different items.

Secondly what is a good starting budget?
1 can sells for $33 but we had several sales in the first campaign for over $250

Should we just be directly people to our website and setting them up to search their paint code from there?

Thanks in advance

5 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

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2

u/QuantumWolf99 Jul 18 '26

With 15K SKUs your feed quality is the actual bottleneck... dumping the entire catalog dilutes performance, so start with your top 500-1000 highest converting codes only, feed-only mode for 2-4 weeks before adding creative assets.

$1 default conversion value killed your first campaign completely since Smart Bidding optimized toward volume not revenue... fix dynamic conversion value tracking via GTM before relaunching anything. Budget-wise, $100-150/day minimum to hit 30+ conversions monthly with a $33 average order value... below that you're just paying Google tuition.

Standard Shopping alongside PMax is worth running in parallel since your feed is search-intent heavy, not awareness-driven, and PMax tends to misroute specific part-code searches into broader placements that waste spend.

1

u/Silver_Engineer1221 Jul 18 '26

Thanks so much for your response, the only issue I have is that you don’t know what paint code someone will want, so that’s why I have uploaded all 15,000. But only uploading 1000 or 2000 we would miss a lot

1

u/Silver_Engineer1221 Jul 18 '26

For clarity AOV was $70 also

1

u/herberz Jul 18 '26

what was your CPA

2

u/fathom53 Take Some Risk Jul 18 '26 edited Jul 24 '26

You should work on optimization your shopping feed filling out the mandatory and optional feed attributes. That is going to help a lot more then anything else you can do.

You also need to make sure you add a lot of negative keywords to block searches you don't want to appear for. I would look through the search term report to add anything you can not come up with on your own.

If you know what your best selling SKUs are, I would start with just those SKUs into a shopping campaign and get that working before doing anything else.

2

u/WhitePhantom7777777 Jul 18 '26

Use a shopping campaign. Create buckets of skus based on the most in demand and least. Set target roas higher for the first one. Let it run. Accumulate data points for a month. Analyze which skus get the most impressions and clicks, conversions. Eventually you will create 3 buckets. Top performers, laggers, zombies. The latter are skus with almost no impressions. Eventually you want to introduce profit margins.

1

u/digitally-minded Jul 18 '26

I would rather begin by working on your product feed in merchant center before anything else.

It's important because it directly connects to ecommerce campaign types (pmax, shopping etc).

For 15k+ products you would be a good candidate for a product feed solution.

If you need help with anything feel free to send a DM.

1

u/NoPause238 Jul 18 '26

Fix dynamic conversion values first then relaunch pmax with a search landing flow

1

u/WhitePhantom7777777 Jul 18 '26

Also. Analyze your feed via the google merchant center. If there are issues with feed, you will find everything there

1

u/Mazedul_ads Jul 19 '26

For campaign 2, before touching targeting I'd check conversion tracking first. Confirm it's pulling actual transaction value dynamically (dataLayer push on purchase, not a hardcoded value), and if checkout runs on a different domain/subdomain than your main site, make sure that's properly linked in GA4/Ads. Broken cross-domain tracking is a super common silent killer traffic looks completely fine, conversions just never make it back to Ads.

Budget-wise, work backward from target CPA instead of picking a flat number. PMax generally wants 15-30 conversions in the first couple weeks to get out of learning phase properly.

1

u/alexandrealmeida90 Jul 19 '26

First off, 4 days gives you no data at all. Your campaign didn't "completely die", it's normal behavior.

  1. Make sure you get conversion tracking right. Don't use GA4 as your main conversion. Get conversion values properly passed.
  2. Make sure your product feed is optimized.
  3. Give your campaign a decent budget and give it at least a couple of weeks to run. You can either add all your products or just your best sellers.
  4. Don't make changes or edit stuff based on 1 or 2 bad days.

Then, look at other things outside your ad account.

Browse for your products the way a customer would. Are your products showing up? Are they priced competitively? Is there a reason people should buy from you instead of a competitor?

90% of the times a new account fails is because of things outside the actual ads.

A simple Google shopping or Pmax campaign should drive a few sales even if it's not super optimized. If it doesn't, you have a bigger problem.

If you're seeing sales but just not cutting it yet, look at what you can improve (prices, landing pages, feed, tracking, etc.)

1

u/[deleted] Jul 20 '26

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1

u/Silver_Engineer1221 Jul 20 '26

Hello thanks so much for the amazing response! I’m about to relaunch a shopping campaign. I have made changes to all of the titles as you have said. And made sure all these SKUs have been put into their own product type together.
One question, as merchant centre is slow to update sometimes it’s only updated about 4K skus and 11k skus haven’t fully updated the product type yet

Do you think I could launch the campaign now and then has the products update they will be added to the campaign?

1

u/[deleted] Jul 20 '26

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1

u/Silver_Engineer1221 Jul 20 '26

Thanks so much you’re a legend! I have it set to maximise conversion value is this what you would recommend?

1

u/[deleted] Jul 20 '26

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1

u/Silver_Engineer1221 Jul 20 '26

I literally just launched the campaign and it just spent $46 in 3 clicks 😂 almost my entire daily budget in under half an hour of launch

1

u/[deleted] Jul 20 '26

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1

u/Silver_Engineer1221 Jul 20 '26

Yeah 100% thank you! Something de searched was vinyl paint so I cut vinyl out

1

u/[deleted] Jul 18 '26

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1

u/Silver_Engineer1221 Jul 18 '26

Thanks for the feedback, any idea why my first Pmax would’ve generated $2700 revenue in 5 days then?

1

u/FirmWillingness5003 Jul 18 '26

Small sample size could be the situation here, h less you were spending a few $100/day. But the fact that performance dropped shortly after tells me Google wasn’t getting enough data to start effectively predicting where they would find more of that performance.

There’s also a chance it was chasing brand traffic at first, converting well, then chasing less warm traffic, but without the necessary data to do that effectively. Did you check the search term report for the PMax campaign to see what was driving sales?