Performance Max: Feed-Only vs All Assets [Guide]

If you are an eCommerce merchant using Performance Max campaigns, then you have an important choice to make: To go with a feed-only approach or utilize all assets?

A feed-only PMax campaign relies exclusively on product feed data as its primary source of information. Whereas, the full assets approach gives Google’s AI more creative input to optimize across placements.

But which set up offers more control, better reach, and consistent optimization results? This blog delves into the difference between feed-only and all-assets Performance Max Campaigns. We explore the pros and cons, and help you decide which one is the best for your eCommerce store.

Let’s dive into Performance Max: Feed-Only vs Full Asset Campaigns.

TLDR; explore the differences between Feed Only vs All Assets PMax campaigns.

Full Asset vs. Feed-Only Performance Max Campaigns

Feature	All Assets in PMax	Feed-Only Approach
Creative Variety	Uses a mix of headlines, descriptions, images, logos, and videos to dynamically generate ads across all Google networks.	Limited to product feed assets (titles, images, price, etc.). Ad formats resemble Shopping Ads only. No custom text or media assets are used.
Reach & Channels	Google Search, Shopping, Display Network, YouTube, Gmail, Discover, Maps. Targets customers throughout their customer journey.	Primarily Google Shopping placements, Search (via Shopping format), and sometimes YouTube Shopping cards.
Optimization	Google tests and improves based on your assets and budget.	Google optimizes based on your product feed only.
Conversion Performance	Can get more sales by reaching new people across channels. It has a broader reach and creates personalized ads increasing chances of conversions.	Good for sales from people already searching for your products. Better suited for targeting bottom-of-the-funnel customers.
Insights & Reporting	Detailed reporting on asset-level performance, audience signals, and top-performing combinations. Valuable for learning what creatives or audiences work best.	No reports to see which creatives are working.
Ease of Management	Needs time to create good images, videos, and text. Google takes care of the rest.	Easier to manage. Just keep your product feed clean and up to date.
Use Case Suitability	Best for brands looking to generate awareness, engagement, and conversions. Ideal for promotions, new product launches, or full-funnel strategy.	Great for stores that want simple, sales-focused ads. Ideal when creative resources are limited.
Resource Demand	Need to make high quality creatives like images, headlines, and videos. However, the auto create assets feature is available.	No creatives needed, just a well-made product feed.

Feed-Only Performance Max Campaigns

Feed-only PMax campaigns use the product feed submitted to your Google Merchant Center account. This means your campaign will use the data available such as product images, title, description, price and more to create ads. The quality of your product data becomes crucial for the success of your campaign. There are no additional creative assets like images, videos or text used if the feed-only option is selected.

Additionally, the campaigns placements are limited to Google Shopping, dynamic remarketing, YouTube and Display–focusing on bottom-of-the-funnel audiences with shopping intent.

Feed-only campaigns are ideal for eCommerce brands that want to concentrate on product-focused ads without the need for creative assets for individual products.

How To Create A Feed-Only Campaign?

Start by connecting your Google Merchant Center account to your Google Ads account.
When creating your PMax campaign, ensure you select “Add Products to this Campaign” and then select the GMC account you want to use.
Select your campaign settings as per usual.
Disable automatically created assets.
When you reach the “Assets” section, leave everything blank.
Configure the rest of the settings and publish your campaign.
There are 2 other ways to create a feed only PMax campaign – Directly through Google Merchant Center and by using Google experiments. Advertisers also use listing groups to run ads for specific product groups.

Benefits of Feed-Only Approach

Feed-only campaigns offer simplified setup and management. They rely solely on the product data of your GMC feed and don’t require additional creative assets. This means you can create and launch PMax campaigns quickly without spending extra time creating assets.

It focuses on Shopping Placements targeting high purchase intent users.

These campaigns help automate the marketing process of large inventories. Advertisers don’t have to create individual creatives for each product, eliminating manual asset management. By leveraging Google’s automation based only on product data, feed only campaigns ensure each product is dynamically matched to high-intent queries across Google’s Shopping inventory. This leads to higher Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).

Feed only campaigns funnel your budget into Shopping and remarketing ads (and other placements too) with Google’s AI doing the heavy lifting of automating and optimizing. This ensures your budget is spent effectively. To use your budget even more effectively, consider running Demand Gen campaigns for brand awareness. This way you have one focusing on creating awareness and the other focusing on bottom-of-the-funnel leads, a win win.

Shopify Integration Challenges

Shopify stores can also use a feed only campaign. The setup is simple and straightforward. They need to connect their Shopify store to Google Merchant Center through a product feed management app, a manual feed or through the Google & Youtube app.

Once your Shopify product feed is submitted to GMC then you can proceed with creating your feed only campaign. Remember that, feed only campaigns rely on your product feed so ensure it stays updated and optimized. Resolve any issues Google Merchant Center flags immediately as it could affect the performance of your ads. To measure the effectives of your campaigns, ensure you set up conversion tracking.

Set up your conversion tracking properly to avoid any misfiring of the pixel or recording duplicate conversions. It is better to use a conversion tracking app specifically for Shopify stores running Google Ads. One such app is Nabu for Google Ads Pixel. Through the app you can create/add pixels, track events such as conversions, add to cart, begin check out or post purchase upsells. It also fixes tracking errors like duplicate conversions and missing conversion values.

All Assets Performance Max Campaigns

An all assets approach means using creative assets for your PMax campaign (i.e. the default setting). PMax assets range from images, text (headlines, descriptions, etc), videos, logos, URLs, CTAs and extensions.

To be successful using assets incorporate all the asset types, avoid leaving any field blank. The more the merrier strategy applies here. Think of it this way, if Google’s AI has more inputs to refer to, the better the ads and results.

For the same reason avoid limiting your assets, be diverse. Create different asset groups to optimize your campaign for different audiences, themes, or product categories. Google allows you to add 100 asset groups per campaign.

Since you are running product based campaigns, it is best to create asset groups based on product categories. This will help you manage your campaigns better. When writing headlines and descriptions, ensure it accurately reflects the products within each asset group.

For example, create 5 assets groups for skincare products. And 5 other asset groups for cosmetic products. Google’s AI will dynamically match the right products to the asset type and generate an ad through machine learning.

Ensure all assets are of high quality to generate engagement. You can use campaign exclusions if you don’t want your ads to appear on irrelevant platforms. For example, you’re an eCommerce brand selling luxury skincare. You don’t want your ads showing up next to low-quality content or gaming YouTube videos.

How To Create An All Assets Campaign?

Start by creating a new PMax campaign as per usual, and add the assets in the creation stage. You can add additional asset groups later once the campaign is published.
Turn on automatic asset creation if you want Google AI to generate assets for you from a URL or provided assets.

Advantages of All Assets Approach

Creative Optimization – PMax dynamically mixes and matches all your creative assets to create customized ads for specific audiences and contexts. In this way, the asset combination testing helps you figure out the best performing variants which a single product feed can’t achieve.

Broader Reach – With an asset approach, you run campaigns across the entire Google Ads inventory. This helps maximize your reach and target users at different points of their customer journey. Whereas, feed only campaigns focus on Shopping ads and limited placements.

AI Optimization – Google’s AI continuously optimizes your ads based on the assets in real time. This optimization extends beyond feed data to ensure your ads are served on multiple channels and placements.

Integration with Shopify

Shopify merchants will have to manually create asset groups based on product category. Nearly all the data, images, headlines, descriptions, logos, etc will have to be added when creating asset groups. If you have a large inventory focus on products you absolutely need to run ads for. Or they can use a feed only approach or a mix of both (a hybrid approach).

When matching landing page URLs you can either:

Create an asset group for one best seller product and add its URL. For example: https://yourstore.com/products/eco-vitamin-c-serum

Create an asset group for a product category and link the category page. For example: https://yourstore.com/collections/skincare (Final URL expansion can be used here too)

Use Final URL expansion – This automatically replaces your Final URL with a more relevant landing page based on intent and the search query.

It is also important to remember that your placements will not focus on Shopping ads, but rather across all Google channels in various formats. Google’s AI will optimize your placements accordingly. Ensure you are using PMax audience signals and search themes so you can target the right type of audience. Once your campaign has been running for a few weeks, access your Search Terms Report and add negative keywords to your PMax campaign to exclude irrelevant traffic.

Differences in Performance and Budget Allocation

Let’s explore how feed only vs all assets approach differs in terms of performance and budget allocation.

Performance Outcomes

Feed only and all assets approaches have different performance outcomes.

Feed only PMax campaigns focus on Google Shopping and a few other placements–highlighting its narrow scope. They are more effective for eCommerce merchants targeting shoppers. Feed only campaigns offer higher ROAS in the short term.

Conversions are more cost efficient. You avoid spending your budget on top-of-the-funnel placements and focus on high intent users. Google’s AI specifically optimizes these types of campaigns for conversions. However, because the campaigns focus on conversions, you might miss out on new customers because of the configuration of these types of ads.

All assets PMax campaigns have a broader reach and target audiences at all points of their customer journey. This leads to more conversions over time. You also introduce your brand to completely new shoppers who weren’t aware of your brand or its offerings. In the long run, you build awareness and grow your brand’s future customer base.

Although, your ROAS may start lower because some budget is used for awareness campaigns like YouTube or Display. Performance can also experience some fluctuations depending on how strong your assets are and how fast Google’s AI learns.

Metrics to prioritize and monitor: Conversion volume, conversion value, ROAS, CPC, CPA, impression share and engagement metrics (CTR). By monitoring these metrics you will understand which approach works best for your business goals.

Budget Allocation

With an all assets approach Google’s AI will dynamically allocate your budget across all Google channels–wherever the opportunity of conversions is the highest. Thus, you cannot specifically select a channel to funnel more budget towards. You can exclude placements if you find certain placements are not lucrative.

PMax requires a sufficient budget to gather data in the initial learning phase. A higher budget allows the AI to learn faster and optimize more effectively. Google recommends that your daily budget is 3x your target CPA or CPC.

In a feed only approach, the budget is primarily concentrated on Google Shopping ads, relying exclusively on your product feed. In some sense, you have more control over where your budget is spent because feed only prioritizes product-focused ads. This is ideal for e-commerce businesses whose primary goal is to drive direct product sales.

If you are running feed only, all assets, and other types of campaigns (Search, Display) then you can use the Experiments feature. It allows you to test different aspects of your campaigns, one of them being bidding strategies without affecting your original campaign’s performance. Monitor performance metrics during the test period. Gradually reallocate the budget towards campaigns that are doing better.

Risks and Limitations of Feed-Only Campaigns

While feed only campaigns are beneficial for eCommerce merchants, they do have their fair share of risks and limitations.

Limited Optimization

Since you are not including additional assets like videos you limit your placement options. Say you turn off the ‘automatically create assets’ setting, Google’s AI will limit your placements to Shopping Ads environments. You might not be able to tap into YouTube instream ads, Discovery ads or even Display ads. However, you can turn on the setting if you want more placement options. It is important to remember that automatically created assets may not always align with your brand’s quality or messaging.

Either way, PMax feed only overall has limited placements because of the limited assets available. PMax uses assets to optimize ads and tailor them to different audiences and placements. This can result in lower CTRs and conversion rates.

Control Challenges

Your product feed is the sole driver of ad relevance and targeting, leaving little room for creative or strategic input.

In order to maintain control and optimize feed only PMax campaigns advertisers should optimize their feed quality, keep it updated, segment products by using listing groups, and continuously monitor and adjust.

Strategy Considerations and Best Practices

Now let’s discuss which strategy, Feed Only vs All Assets is right for you. We will also be discussing the best practices for each.

Choosing the Right Approach

When choosing the right approach consider the asset scope and campaign reach. Feed only is more suitable for retail advertisers focused on product level marketing. Ecommerce merchants with extensive product catalogs often benefit from these types of campaigns because they maximize shopping and dynamic performance.

An asset only approach is suitable for lead generation purposes, brand awareness, broad reach campaigns, businesses with a small inventory, and advertisers wanting to experiment with this campaign type.

Feed only campaigns are better advertisers wanting bottom-of-the-funnel traffic. They rely on feed data decreasing creative flexibility and optimization. But are better suited for direct response goals like conversion volume.

With assets only, Google’s AI mixes and matches assets for optimal performance across networks increasing the potential for optimization and creative testing. It is best suited for an omnichannel reach and multiple conversion goals.

If you are running PMax campaigns (feed only and all assets), and other ad campaigns then you need to be careful about the configuration. Ensure they are not targeting the same keywords or audiences. Remember that the campaign with the highest ad rank gets displayed.

Feed only campaigns don’t offer much insights into performance of the assets. Asset only offers detailed reports into the performance of the assets. The border the asset mix, the less granular control and reporting advertisers have.

Experimentation and Testing

Google Ads offers an experiment feature for PMax campaigns that supports A/B testing of various settings, camping elements, and features to improve performance.

This means advertisers can run controlled experiments to compare bidding strategies, targeting, or creative variations within your campaign. You can duplicate existing campaigns and tweak the elements you want to compare.

PMax is mostly automated so try to test variables that you have direct control over like asset groups, bidding strategies, conversion goals, etc.

Google recently introduced a specialized asset testing feature for feed only PMax campaigns. In a nutshell, it splits the traffic within one PMax campaign into a control and treatment group.

Control Group: Ads served using only Merchant Center product feed and no additional assets.

Treatment group: Ads served using product feed data plus additional creative assets such as images, videos, and ad copy.

When running experiments ensure you are making changes based on the results.

Budget Management Tips

To achieve success align your budget and bid strategies with your campaign goals.

When configuring bidding settings use the optional input when selecting your bidding strategies.

Target Cost Per Action (Target CPA) when using Maximize Conversions

Target Return on Ad Spend (Target ROAS) when using Maximize Conversion Value

Why?

Without the optional inputs (Target CPA or Target ROAS), you are giving Google’s AI more freedom to bid aggressively to meet your objectives within your budget. Yes, this can indeed drive significant volume but it may come at the cost of less control over CPA or ROAS.

Next, allocate a separate budget for key products or categories by using dedicated campaigns and structure asset groups (use listing groups for feed only) to target different audiences or catalog segments.

Lastly, ensure your campaigns are generating enough conversions to give Google’s AI meaningful data to optimize performance.

Recent Changes and Updates

Google Ads has introduced a few exciting new features for PMax campaigns.

In Q3 2024, Google began rolling out enhanced reporting & insights for PMax campaigns. This included channel level performance, more Search Term Insights and improved asset group reporting.

Channel level performance is a big one! Advertisers can see how their PMax campaigns are performing across different Google channels in a more detailed breakdown.

Some other new features include adding negative keywords at the campaign level for PMax, brand exclusions, “URL” contains for product feeds, device targeting and more.

FAQs

What are the key differences between feed-only and all assets in a Performance Max campaign?

Feed-only campaigns rely solely on product feeds submitted in Google Merchant Center, while all-assets campaigns utilize a variety of assets like images and videos that are inputted by you.

How do feed-only and all assets strategies impact ad performance in Performance Max campaigns?

Feed-only strategies may limit optimization and reach but are beneficial for eCommerce merchants because of their Shopping specific placements. While all-assets strategies can enhance engagement and performance through diverse media and a broader reach.

How do I decide whether to use feed-only or all assets for my Performance Max campaign?

Feed only is best suited for eCommerce merchants with a large inventory targeting immediate buyers. Assets only are good for all stages of the funnel. Consider your business goals, available resources, and the level of control you desire over your campaign’s creative elements.

How can I optimize my product feed for better performance in a feed-only Performance Max campaign?

Ensure accurate and up-to-date product data, use high-quality images, and optimize product titles and descriptions for search relevance. Address any feed issues highlighted by Google Merchant Center immediately.

How can I integrate video assets effectively in a Performance Max campaign with all assets?

Create engaging and relevant video content that aligns with your brand message and target audience, and test different formats for best results. Alternatively, Google AI can auto create videos for you as well.

Check Out These Related Articles: