A poorly structured PMax account can waste budget, inflate conversions, and deliver poor ROI. The best Performance Max structure aligns your business goals. You want all your campaigns to be profitable, data-rich, and strategically segmented.

Main campaigns structure

Let’s start with the core structure of your Performance Max campaigns. This will serve as the default setup through which the majority of your budget will be allocated.

ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)

A ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) campaign structure focuses on maximizing return by allocating more budget to high-performing products and less to underperformers. It uses historical performance data to segment campaigns into tiers:

• High ROAS campaign: Focus on your best products (60 % of the budget) with the highest ROAS goals.
• Medium ROAS campaign: For decent performers set balanced goals and budget (30 %) and test what works.
• Low ROAS campaign: For weaker products limit spend (maximum of 10 % of the budget), but still give them some visibility.

This setup is ideal for brands with enough data to make informed decisions and the capacity to monitor performance regularly. 

Key benefits:

• Focuses spend on top-performing products
• Data-driven and customizable
• Scalable with evolving trends

🔗 Read the full guide: Structuring for Maximum ROAS Performance

POAS (Profit on Ad Spend)

A POAS-based (Profit on Ad Spend) structure focuses on actual profit instead of revenue. Unlike ROAS, which only measures return in sales, POAS considers product margins, COGS, operational and budget costs, giving a clearer picture of true campaign performance. In Performance Max, this ensures your budget supports profitable products, not just high-ticket ones.

Benefits of POAS Structure

• Targets high-margin, high-profit conversions
• Prioritizes ads that drive true business value
• Data-driven decisions, uses actual costs for better strategy
• Keeps budget away from unprofitable products

Profit Margin grouping

The Profit Margin-based Performance Max structure groups products by their gross profit margin, allowing you to allocate budget more effectively. Instead of treating all products equally, this setup gives more ad spend to high-margin items, ensuring you're investing in what actually drives profit. The structure could look like:

• High profit margin (High-GPM%): Lower ROAS target and a highest budget. This allows higher bids and potentially greater revenue.
• Medium profit margin (Medium-GPM%): Medium ROAS target, balanced budget.
• Low profit margin (Low-GPM%): Higher ROAS target to limit bids. This makes sure you maintain profitability.

This strategy is ideal for businesses with a wide range of product margins, helping increase market share on high-margin items without bleeding budget on low-profit products.

Key benefits

• More efficient budget use across product types
• Prioritizes high-margin, high-return items
• Reduces wasted spend on low-profit products
• Boosts sustainable growth and profitability

Custom scoring

This can be a combination of all the strategies above. You can create advanced conditions for segmenting products or assign them scores based on metrics like conversions, ROAS, profit, and more. The key is to align the structure with your business goals. While the setup and naming are flexible, let’s use the Heroes/Villains framework as an example:

• Heroes – your top-performing, high-priority products
• Sidekicks – products that are close to meeting your targets
• Villains – products that consistently underperform or fall short of your goals

There are no universal advantages or disadvantages to this approach, you just need to craft it in a way that works best for your specific needs.

Secondary “add-on” campaigns

Not every product deserves equal exposure or investment. Additionally, Performance Max still has some limitations, such as overlooking new or seasonal products. That’s why it’s healthy for your PPC strategy to include dedicated Performance Max campaigns.

Here are some of the most common types:

Bestsellers

A Bestseller campaign in Performance Max gives your top-performing products extra attention, helping you unlock even more value from what already works. Instead of replacing your main campaign structure, it complements it. This allows you to tailor budgets and creative assets specifically for products with proven demand. You can define bestsellers based on sales volume, conversion value, or a mix of metrics from platforms like Google Analytics or your CRM.

🔗 Read the full guide: Bestsellers campaign

Underperformers

A dedicated Underperformers campaign in Performance Max gives struggling products a final chance to perform. These products have had enough budget and impressions but didn’t meet key benchmarks like ROAS or POAS. Isolating them lets you manage bids and budgets more precisely while gathering insights to improve your overall strategy.

This approach helps identify weak spots and optimizes budget allocation by giving underperformers one last opportunity without hurting your main campaigns.

🔗 Read the full guide: Low-performers campaign

Zombies

A Zombies campaign targets products with zero or very low clicks/impressions—often overlooked by Performance Max’s algorithm. These “ghost” or “zombie” products may have hidden potential but haven’t had a fair chance to perform. By isolating and promoting them with a small budget, you can revive seasonal items, uncover new revenue opportunities, and diversify your portfolio.

This approach not only helps clear inventory but also identifies future bestsellers, giving your business long-term growth and improved PPC results.

🔗 Read the full guide: No-click products campaign

New products

A dedicated campaign for new products gives them the spotlight they need to gain traction, as algorithms tend to favor items with existing data. By isolating new products, you ensure full budget focus, helping them build visibility and perform better when moved to main campaigns.

This approach boosts early exposure and long-term success, though it may lead to higher costs per conversion and varying product volumes due to the temporary nature of “new” status.

🔗 Read the full guide: New products campaign

Structuring Asset Groups: From categories to audiences

Organizing asset groups effectively is important for maximizing Performance Max campaigns. Asset groups should be divided by theme to boost ad relevance, allowing you to tailor texts, images, and videos for specific audiences. This targeted approach improves click-through rates (CTR), conversion rates, lowers cost-per-click (CPC), and ultimately enhances campaign ROI.

One or more Asset groups?

Organizing asset groups by theme boosts ad relevance by allowing tailored texts, images, and videos for specific audiences. This improves click-through rates (CTR), conversion rates, lowers cost-per-click (CPC), and enhances overall campaign performance.

However, creating and managing multiple asset groups requires more effort and can split clicks across groups, reducing data for Google’s optimization. Since Google can generate assets from your landing page and product feed, detailed asset group segmentation isn’t always necessary.

Our golden rule is that each asset group should have at least 20 conversions per month—the more, the better. If your asset groups have fewer than 5 conversions, consider merging them. Overall, it’s usually beneficial to divide asset groups, balancing improved relevance with manageable workload and data fragmentation.

Asset Group divisions

• Generic Asset Group: Covers all products with general creatives, often serving as a safety net alongside more specific groups.
• Category-based Asset Groups: Organized by main website categories, easy to manage but may sacrifice some relevance.
• Target group-based Asset Groups: Tailored to specific audience segments (e.g., teens, young women), effective for niches like Fashion or Home & Living.
• Promotion Asset Groups: Dedicated to special promotions (e.g., Black Friday), creating urgency without disrupting other asset groups.
• Dynamic Asset Groups: Prioritized by sales or search volumes to focus on top-performing brands, categories, or products, useful when limited to 100 asset groups per campaign.

Final thoughts: Product strategy is the key

When structured strategically, PMax can deliver phenomenal returns. But that only happens when you give the algorithm clear guidance on what matters most to your business — whether that’s margin, product lifecycle, or audience fit.

Performance Max could be powerful. But with the right structure, it becomes unstoppable.