Exclude store listing pages from PMax campaigns

Stop wasting ads on store listings, and direct PMax traffic to products that sell online.

Reminder: Performance Max displays pages from the feed you provide when the customer is closest to making a purchase, aiming to drive conversions.

However, PMax may not always perform by its intended principle, as it sometimes struggles to assess the value of specific pages.

For instance, if your brand operates both physical and online stores, PMax might drive traffic to your store pages instead of focusing solely on conversions. This is a common issue for brands with physical locations when running PMax.

As a result, you might find it challenging to accurately measure campaign performance because the traffic driven by Performance Max may not lead to sales.

It's important to review the pages receiving clicks without conversions and check whether your store listing page is among them.

If you wish to continue driving traffic to your store listing page, create a separate campaign, allowing for better campaign performance measurement.

You might consider setting up a dedicated PMax campaign for this store listing page. But before doing so, you must exclude this page from your existing PMax campaigns.

How do you exclude your store listing page from PMax?

1. Navigate to Products: Go to the "Products" section in the sidebar menu of Google Merchant Center and click on "Feeds" to access your data feeds.
2. Select Your Feed: Find the product feed you want to modify and open it for editing.
3. Edit Feed Content:For file-based feeds (XML, TXT, CSV, etc.), delete the entries for the store listing page by editing the file offline, then re-upload it. If your feed is linked via API or directly from your e-commerce platform, adjust the settings to remove the store listing pages.
4. Update the Feed: Upload the revised feedback to the Merchant Center.
5. Check Feed Configuration: Ensure that the "link" and "image_link" attributes point to eCommerce product pages, not your store locator pages.
6. Test and Publish the Feed: Perform tests on your feed to find any issues. Resolve them and then publish the updated feed.

Make sure the updates from the Merchant Center are reflected in your Google Ads account. You can confirm this by checking the product details in Google Ads to see if they align with the revised feed. If discrepancies are found, use the "Fetch now" feature in Google Merchant Center or synchronize the data manually.

Join heybooster University to get a PMax checklist to maximize your PMax campaigns ROAS.