Hi there,
Thanks for reaching out!
I had a look at your situation with your e-comm gift store and the advice you've been given about splitting your PMax campaigns. It's a common suggestion, but to be brutally honest, I think it might be putting the cart before the horse. Just tweaking campaign structure is rarely the magic bullet people hope it is. Often, the real problem lies a bit deeper in the funnel, on your actual website. I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance on where I think you should be focusing your efforts instead to get some real traction.
TLDR;
- Stop obsessing over campaign structure. Your specialist's advice to segment PMax is a tactic, not a strategy, and it won't fix underlying problems.
- The real reason your ads might not be reaching their full potential is almost certainly your website's conversion funnel, specifically your product pages and lack of trust signals.
- Before you spend another pound on ads or create new campaigns, you need to diagnose where customers are dropping off. High clicks but no sales points to a website problem, not an ad problem.
- The most important piece of advice is: focus on improving your product photos, writing persuasive descriptions, and adding customer reviews. PMax feeds on these assets; better assets mean better results.
- This letter includes an interactive calculator to help you understand your customer lifetime value (LTV), which is the metric you should be optimising for, not just campaign performance.
We'll need to look at your funnel, not just your campaigns...
Right, let's get straight to it. The advice to segment your PMax campaigns by category isn't necessarily *wrong*, it's just premature. It's what people do when they don't know what else to do. Your idea to focus on top products is a bit better because it focuses on winners, but it still suffers from the same fundamental issue: you're trying to optimise the engine without checking if the car has wheels.
Performance Max is a black box. You feed it assets (product feed, images, copy, videos) and a goal (like maximising conversion value), and it goes off and does its thing across all of Google's channels. The quality of what you put in directly impacts the quality of what comes out. If your product pages don't convert, if your photos are weak, or if your copy is boring, PMax will just find more and more people to show a poor offer to, and you'll burn through your budget.
Splitting the campaigns right now would just mean you're running two underperforming campaigns instead of one. The first thing we need to do is diagnose the leaks in your sales funnel. You need to become an investigator. Where are people dropping off?
- Low Click-Through Rate (CTR)? -> This points to a problem with your ads themselves. Your product images in the shopping feed might be poor, your pricing could be off, or your ad copy (if you're using asset groups) isn't compelling.
- High CTR but low 'Add to Carts'? -> This is the big one. This means your ads are working! They are getting interested people to your site. The problem lies squarely on your product page. Something there is putting them off. This is where most e-comm stores, especially gift stores, fail.
- Lots of 'Add to Carts' but few Purchases? -> This usually points to a problem in your checkout process. Unexpectedly high shipping costs are the number one killer here. A confusing checkout flow or a lack of payment options are also common culprits.
You need to dig into your Google Analytics and your Ads account and find the answers to these questions. The data will tell you exactly where the problem is. My money is on the product page. Before you even think about campaign structure, we have to fix the page that's meant to do the selling.
1. Ad Impression
Metric: CTR
(Click-Through Rate)
2. Website Visit
Metric: Bounce Rate
(Page Engagement)
3. Product Page
Metric: Add to Cart %
(Product Appeal)
4. Checkout
Metric: Checkout Completion %
(Friction)
5. Purchase
Metric: Conversion Rate
(Success!)
I'd say your product pages are leaking money...
Based on my experience with dozens of e-commerce campaigns, this is where the gold is. For one client, a women's apparel brand, we achieved a 691% return. A major factor in campaigns like this is ensuring the product pages are fully optimised, because for a gift store, this is even more critical. Purchases are emotional; you're not just selling an item, you're selling the feeling the recipient will have when they open it.
Here's what your product pages probably need:
1. Proper Photography. This is non-negotiable. Standard, boring product-on-white-background shots are not enough. You need lifestyle images. If it's a piece of jewellery, show it on a model. If it's a home decor item, show it in a beautifully styled room. If it's a food gift, show it being enjoyed at a gathering. You need to help the customer visualise the moment. A short video of the product being unboxed or used is even better. People can't touch or feel the product online, so your images and videos have to do all teh heavy lifting.
2. Persuasive Product Descriptions. Most e-comm stores just list features. "10cm x 15cm wooden box. Engraved lid." That doesn't sell anything. You need to sell the outcome. You need to write copy that connects with the buyer's intent. They are buying a gift to make someone feel special, loved, or appreciated. Your copy needs to reflect that.
Let's take a hypothetical product - a personalised music box. A bad description is just the specs. A good description uses a framework like Before-After-Bridge.
Copywriting Example: Personalised Music Box
| Section | Before (Weak Copy) | After (Persuasive Copy) |
|---|---|---|
| Headline | Wooden Music Box | The Unforgettable Gift: A Personalised Melody Just For Them |
| Opening (Before) | Remember the struggle of finding a unique gift? A gift that feels impersonal and quickly forgotten. | Remember searching for a gift that truly says "I love you," only to end up with something generic? That feeling of disappointment when you know it could have been more special. |
| Middle (After) | Imagine their eyes lighting up as they open a beautiful, hand-crafted music box. They turn the key, and a melody that's 'your song' begins to play. | Imagine their face lighting up as they open a beautifully engraved wooden box. They turn the handle, and the first few notes of their favourite song—or even 'your song'—fill the room. It’s not just a gift; it's a memory, a moment captured forever. |
| End (Bridge) | This personalised music box is the perfect solution. Choose your song and add a custom engraving. | Our personalised music box is the bridge to that unforgettable moment. We take your chosen melody and embed it into a timeless keepsake, engraved with a message from your heart. Give a gift that will be cherished for a lifetime. |
See the difference? One is a description of an object. The other is a solution to a problem (finding a meaningful gift). This kind of copywriting is an investment that pays for itself over and over again.
You probably should focus on building trust...
When someone lands on an unfamiliar gift store from an ad, their first question is "Can I trust this site?". If the answer isn't an immediate and resounding "yes," they will leave. You have about three seconds to make a good impression. Many small stores look amateurish, and that kills conversions, no matter how good your ads are.
You need to litter your site, especially the product and checkout pages, with trust signals. This is about removing any friction or doubt from the buyer's mind.
- Customer Reviews: This is the single most powerful trust signal. If you don't have reviews on your product pages, you are leaving a huge amount of money on the table. Use an app like Loox, Yotpo, or Judge.me to collect and display photo reviews. Seeing other real people happy with their purchase is immensely reassuring.
- Clear Shipping & Returns Policy: Be upfront about costs and timelines. Link to a clear, easy-to-understand policy. No one wants to get to the final stage of checkout and be surprised by a £10 shipping fee. It's better to incorporate some of the shipping cost into the product price and offer "free" or cheaper shipping.
- Professional "About Us" Page: Tell your story. Who are you? Why did you start this store? People connect with people, not faceless websites. A picture of you or your team adds a massive amount of humanity and trust.
- Contact Information: A physical address (if possible), a phone number, and a professional email address are crucial. It shows you're a real business and not some dodgy dropshipper who'll disappear after taking their money.
- Secure Payment Badges: Display logos for Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, etc., near your 'Add to Cart' and checkout buttons. It’s a small visual cue that reinforces security.
Fixing these things will have a far greater impact on your revenue than any amount of campaign segmentation. A 1% increase in your website's conversion rate is often more valuable and sustainable than a 10% increase in traffic from ads. For instance, with a client selling cleaning products, we generated a 633% return. A key part of achieving results like this is focusing on fundamentals like on-site trust signals to improve the conversion rate before scaling ad spend.
You'll need a better way to measure success...
The final peice of the puzzle is to stop thinking about individual campaign performance and start thinking about your business metrics. The most important metric you're probably not tracking is Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). This tells you what a customer is actually worth to you over time, not just from their first purchase. For a gift store, this is huge. Someone who buys a birthday gift in March might come back for a Christmas gift in December and an anniversary gift next year.
Knowing your LTV is powerful. Why? Because it tells you how much you can afford to spend to acquire a customer (your Customer Acquisition Cost, or CAC). If you know each new customer is worth £150 to you over their lifetime, spending £30 to acquire them through Google Ads looks like a fantastic deal. Without knowing your LTV, that same £30 CPA might seem expensive and you might pause a perfectly profitable campaign.
Here's a simplified way to calculate it for e-commerce:
LTV = (Average Order Value x Purchase Frequency x Customer Lifetime) x Profit Margin
- Average Order Value (AOV): Total Revenue / Total Orders
- Purchase Frequency: Total Orders / Total Unique Customers
- Customer Lifetime: How long an average customer keeps buying from you (this is harder to track, you can start with a 1-2 year estimate).
This math unlocks intelligent, aggressive growth. You stop worrying about cheap clicks and start focusing on acquiring high-value customers. I've built a small calculator for you to play with these numbers. See how even small changes to AOV or how often people buy from you can dramatically increase what you can afford to spend on ads.
This is the main advice I have for you:
So, to bring it all together, forget what your specialist said for now. Don't touch your campaigns. Your priority list should be completely different and focused on building a solid foundation. Once this is done, *then* you can start intelligently testing new campaign structures with your much-improved assets and website experience.
| Priority | Area of Focus | Specific Action to Take | Expected Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. CRITICAL | Funnel Diagnosis | Use Google Analytics to identify your biggest drop-off point between landing on site, viewing a product, adding to cart, and purchasing. | You'll know exactly where the 'leak' is, so you can focus your effort where it will have the most impact. |
| 2. CRITICAL | Product Pages | For your top 10 products, hire a photographer for lifestyle shots and rewrite the descriptions to focus on emotional benefits and outcomes, not just features. | Significant increase in 'Add to Cart' rate. Better quality assets to feed into PMax. |
| 3. HIGH | Trust & Social Proof | Install a reviews app (like Loox) and start actively soliciting reviews from past customers. Add these reviews prominently on your product pages. | Increase in overall site conversion rate as new visitors feel more confident buying from you. |
| 4. HIGH | Checkout Process | Do a test purchase yourself. Is shipping a surprise? Is it confusing? Be brutally honest. Make shipping costs clear on the product page. | Reduction in abandoned carts and an increase in checkout completion rate. |
| 5. NEXT | Campaign Optimisation | Only after the above are done: Create one new PMax campaign targeting your top 20% selling products, using your new images and feeding it signals from your now-higher converting website. | Your working PMax campaign will now perform even better as it's being fed higher quality data and assets, leading to a better ROAS. |
I know this is a lot to take in, and it's a very different approach from just making a few new campaigns. But this is how you build a sustainable, profitable e-commerce business, not just a store that spends money on ads. It's about creating a system where every pound you spend on advertising has the highest possible chance of returning five or ten pounds back.
Implementing all of this correctly—from the deep data analysis to the copywriting and strategic campaign management—takes a specific kind of expertise and a lot of time. If you'd like to have a chat about how a team of specialists could help you implement this kind of strategic overhaul and take the guesswork out of it, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation where we can look at your specific situation in more detail.
Hope that helps!
Regards,
Team @ Lukas Holschuh
