Performance Max Insights Only Available in GA4
Custom PMAX Landing Page Report for GA4
Within Google Ads, the Landing Page report is not available for Performance Max campaigns. :(
But they are available in a custom report in GA4. So for any lead gen or shopping feed based PMax campaign it is possible to glean some insights not typically available. Even if Final URL expansion is not enabled, it is worth setting up this report. If Final URL expansion has been enabled then it is essential and this report can be used to setup exclusion URLs that should be blocked.
Where to go to Check Final URL Expansion settings in Google Ads, Performance Max campaign Settings
Surprising URLs to Exclude that you may not know about
For any PMax Shopping campaign I can guarantee at least 10% of revenue from PMax is actually coming from post purchase pages. What? Yes, PMax will find users who have just converted and send them back to e.g. their signed in Shopify profile thank you page!
As standard, I now always check and exclude some URLs for any new campaign launch.
e.g. If the campaign is for new customer acquisition then all pages behind a User login should be excluded. Don’t assume PMax will know to do this.
Site Account pages and Post Purchase
/account/
/account/login
/account/logout
/order
/thank-you
Checkout Pages (all or some of)
checkouts/etc
Cart Page
cart/
would this repopulate with a signed in Users full cart history? If not, why is PMax sending users to an empty cart page!
Footer type Pages
/policies
/pages
/about
/career
Suggested Metrics to Include in The Landing Page Report
Views (pageviews)
Views per…
Revenue
New Users
Returning Users
Sessions
Key Events
New PMax Only filtered Landing Page report in GA4
For this website, all of these pages are only available to signed in Users and a Users account details or recent purchases. Some of these Landing Pages also contributed to revenue which it should not have done (due to an issue with the website).
This information can then be used to go back to the PMax campaign settings and Exclude this list of URLs from “expansion”.
Additional use cases for filters and groups for Ecommerce sites could be PDP (Product Description Pages) compared to PLP (Product Listing Pages) compared to Blog pages.
E.g. for Shopify sites:
/collections
/products
/blogs
Perhaps PMax is sending a lot of traffic to a less than relevant blog post with zero revenue (or low engagement) that can now be added to the excluded URL list.
Adding to the Landing Page Filter for PMax only I often also say, Exclude any of the following pages with this Regex :
(.*collections.*)|(.*products.*)|(.*blogs.*)It quickly reveals some interesting exclusion opportunities!
Percentage Of Performance Max Campaigns Running As Remarketing
Edit any Acquisition report and make sure Active Users, New Users and Returning Users are added as Metrics.
In the example screen grab below Remarketing activity within the Cross-network channel accounts for 36% of Users.
This is interesting but to know but hard to do much with directly in PMax as there is no direct mechanism to control this.
Actionable
It could be used in a test with an actual pure Remarketing campaign to compare side-by-side and trends for cannibalization.
Approximate percentage of Remarketing from Cross-Network Channel group e.g. Demand Gen or PMax
Bonus: Get GA4 Metrics in Google Ad Reports
When GA4 and Google Ads are linked cross-sharing Audiences happens automatically with Auto-tagging and Google Signals enabled.
Within the Google Ads side of the connection you have to go back in and edit the link to also import GA4 metrics which will become avaiable within columns in Google Ads reports. These metrics are:
% of Engaged Sessions (the inverse of Bounce Rate)
Events/Session
Avg. Engagement Duration per session
