How to: Switch your existing Performance Max campaign (containing assets) to “products only”

This article explains how to switch your existing Performance Max campaign in Google Ads that contain assets, to a “products only” (= without assets) campaign in 4 steps. By doing this, your pMax campaign will work as a Smart Shopping campaign (which doesn’t exist anymore).

Why would you want to do this?

• To take back control over how much you want to spend on different channels, as this lets you focus on Shopping. You can create a Search campaign alongside the products only Pmax campaign
• If you don’t have good quality assets for your campaigns

Switching your Performance Max campaigns to Product Only

1. First go to the Performance Max campaign you want to change and go to Asset groups. 

In this example, there is one asset group (containing assets). In order to get a products only campaign (without assets), a new asset group needs to be created. Click on the blue + button (shown at the top left corner in the screenshot) to create a new asset group.

Then create the products only asset group in Google Ads using the steps below.

1. Give your asset group a name, in this example: Products only
2. Select the products you want to show, in this example all products are chosen
3. Skip the entire “Assets” block and click on save
   • A) By doing this, you will see that the asset group will only contain products, see screenshot
   • B) Note: if you add an asset and delete it right after (e.g., add an image), you cannot save the asset group. You can only save the (no assets) asset group by not doing anything at all in the “Asset” block.

After creating the ‘Product only’ asset group, you can pause the asset group with assets:

And an important last step is to make sure that “Automatically created assets* > Text assets & Final URL” are turned off (in your Campaign Settings). *This is only in the beta version of Google Ads. If you are not included in the beta, just turn Final URL expansion off. 

That’s it. You have now created a Performance Max campaign without assets. This will give you more control over your channels and minimizes the overlap with other campaigns that you run.

Note: watch this video for a more detailed explanation of how you can create Performance Max campaigns in Google Ads while automatically segmenting your products using the Labelizer Strategy.