This post was originally created to show placement reporting on Smart Shopping Campaigns. Because they have been replaced/killed/murdered by Performance Max campaigns, we thought it would be helpful to update the post to show you how to see placements within Google Performance Max campaigns.

Reporting on Placements in Google Performance Max Campaigns

Here's how to view placements in Google Ads' newest campaign type: Performance Max Campaigns.

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Step 1: 

Navigate to the Pre-Defined Reports section in Google Ads, Select Other, and then click on the Performance Max campaigns placement report

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Step 2: 

You're there! Check out the report, and add in campaigns if you're curious about specific placement details per campaign.

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Sadly, we're very limited as to what you can see in this report. At the time of writing this post, you can only see Impressions at the account or campaign level... you can't see clicks, conversions, or other helpful KPIs to determine performance.

You can also segment by placement type to get a high-level view of how your PMax campaigns (or aggregated Performance Max campaigns) are showing for impressions... but again, sadly no performance or traffic data.

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If you'd like to see the original Smart Shopping Campaign post, read below.

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Running Smart Shopping campaigns but frustrated at how little reporting and data you are receiving? Here is a way we discovered, where you can at least see the Placements associated with your Smart Shopping campaigns... even though you can't yet take any action on these! 🙄 Check out the video, and/or transcript below. Screenshots are added into the transcript.

EDIT 6/13/19: Thanks to some Twitter conversations and more ZATO digging, we've discovered that you now *can* add placement exclusions at an Account Level to Google Smart Shopping Campaigns!

That's huge news and here is a quick walk-through we put together to help out: How to Exclude Placements in Google Performance Max Campaigns

Reporting on Placements in Google Smart Shopping Campaigns Video Transcript

Hey @PPCKirk (Connect with me on: Twitter & LinkedIn) here with ZATO as we think through all things, ecommerce, PPC, specifically in the Google and Bing ads world. Hope you're doing well. I'm your host for the week.If you've heard me before in movies, or videos I guess, not movies you're thinking: "Wow. His voice sounds so much more lower and... radio like."Well, I have a cold so there you go. I like singing and I can hit lower notes when I have a cold.I wanted to give you a brief update of something interesting to do with Smart Shopping. I've definitely been noting to the world on Smart Shopping, "hey, we need better reporting, we need better transparency in this black box thing that Google has done for us."Albeit oftentimes you'll see Smart Shopping work. It'll work great with ROAS and that but I think there are some good questions to be asking as in hey, this thing works, how can we make it even better?

Well, one thing that Eric Marshall, Eric and I are teammates here at ZATO, and he pointed this out. He saw this in Optmyzr so I did a little bit of digging and thought this interesting. Note, warning, spoilers ahead. You actually can't do anything with this data. Just know that it's there. We can see a little bit more reporting in Smart Shopping and that's around placement. So if you look in Google Ad's UI and you look in your Smart Shopping, you will not see any placements listed there. You have the ability to exclude kind of on the account level content, settings. You can exclude things there. But you actually can't see or exclude any individual placements for Smart Shopping campaigns. If you remember, Smart Shopping runs shopping PLAs across multiple channels, search, display, video, that kind of thing.One of the things that Eric discovered using the tool Optmyzr that we utilize for a number of different optimizations in that Optmyzr was created by Fred Vallaeys. He noticed that in their placements tool, they have a placements exclusions tool where it suggests different placements that are poor ROAS or whatever your filter settings are. He noticed that Smart Shopping campaign data was coming in. You could see specific placements coming in through Smart Shopping.So I dug in and looked at that, and sure enough, there is some placement data. Now, you can't do anything with it, but it's there. It's interesting.

So then I thought well, hey, if that's coming through in the API to Optmyzr, maybe it's in the reporting tab within Google as well? So I pulled open Google Ads reporting, the reports tab, and looked for campaigns and placement group. Filtered that, created a little table for that. And low and behold there it was!

So you can through API, through Optmyzr, through the Google Ads report, you can see which placements your Smart Shopping campaigns are running on. Now, can you do anything about that? Nope. Not a dad blasted thing. But now you can see it. You're welcome. Have a good one!

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