In February 2023, Google announced, and has now rolled out, a Page Feeds option for their Performance Max campaigns.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Page Feeds is only available in the "new experience" (read: totally changed UI, again) in Google Ads. So if you still have the older UI, you won't have Page Feeds.

What are Page Feeds in PMax? 

The short and sweet is that Page Feeds allows you to upload and label your website URLs into Google Ads so you can refine (or control) the PMax URL expansion for the pages it utilizes in the feed.

This is most easily done with a spreadsheet, and the template can be found here: Google PMax Page Feeds template (downloaded csv upon click).

Then, a person can Label the row of URLs to group urls and re-upload into Google Ads (Tools and Settings > Business data > Data Feeds).

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The thing about Page Feeds, is that they allow you to do any of three things: 

1. Guide the machine towards pages you value in that asset group with URL expansion turned "ON". This is just a signal (think, recommendation to Google's targeting and bidding algorithms)
2. Force the machine to only display pages you want to display (sorted by labels in your uploaded spreadsheet) in your non-product ads
3. Exclude pages you don't want Google to show in non-product ads

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Important Caveat: At this time, it appears Page Feeds can only be utilized in new PMax campaigns.

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Now, let's talk Final URL expansion, as that is a core part of PMax campaigns, and Page Feeds.

If you remember, keeping the URL Expansion within your PMax campaign set to "on" means Google can utilize any URL it finds on your website.

This can be problematic, and is why (whether you use Page Feeds or not) it is worth monitoring your landing pages in PMax. You may find you are accidentally getting a lot of traffic to pages not ideal for selling (/photos/ or /login/ pages, as an example) and it's worth digging into this.

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Build a Landing Page Report for your PMax Campaign

First, head to the Google Ads Reports tab and build a Landing Page report filtered for your PMax campaigns individually by name(you can select only one if you want to get really granular... BTW, we can't get this report to work by filtering with Campaign Type), then analyze where PMax is sending traffic.

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Any problematic, low profit, or just bad pages on there? These are great pages to exclude from your PMax campaign from being shown automatically as ad Final URLs.

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If you want to leave Final URL expansion "on" (turning it off leaves it limited to your product URLs in the feed, also a good option in some set ups), then the first step is to build a PMax campaign with Final URL expansion turned "on", but with specific URLs designated as excluded. Here is one campaign we have set up at ZATO, since the URLs follow a logical structure.

This falls apart if URLs don't follow a logical structure, or if you really have a limited targeted URL set you want to aim the asset ads (non Product ads where the Final URLs display) in PMax at,and I personally think this is a strong use case for Page Feeds.

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Utilize Page Feeds When you Want to Guide PMax

Page Feeds allow you to exclude or target specific URLs... but they also allow you to guide the URL expansion part of PMax towards the type of pages you're interested in targeting with that campaign.

In my opinion, if you are just hoping to exclude a few specific URLs or something in a logical URL structure, you should just utilize the native settings controls within PMax.

But, if you're hoping to expand beyond that, then I think it's worth thinking about utilizing PMax more. Full disclosure, we're still playing around with these settings, so this should be seen as idea generation and informational only for your own testing purposes... I'm not here saying Page Feeds are going to revolutionize your PMax campaigns... just that it's another interesting thing to look at for guiding the machine.

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If you need to bulk target or exclude a variety of URLs to closely limit what your campaign non-product ads are targeting, I think this is a wise practice and you would simply upload your list of URLs and set specific custom labels within the spreadsheet. You could even make it as simple as setting all URLs you don't want to include as "exclude" and then choose that in Google Ads and you're off to the races.

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However, there is an interesting note by Google in their documentation on Page Feeds of utilizing Page Feeds to guide targeting for asset groups, and I think this is where it could get a little interesting. Perhaps you have asset groups segmented by Product Type, an you want to ensure you only show selected page URLs with specific Product categories that match your segmented asset groups? This could be a strong use case for using a custom label on those, let's say "trainers" so then your "Trainers" Asset group and assets only shows product URLs of trainers (that you've segmented by Product Type within your feed), and then Final URLs of "trainers" (perhaps you have a number of interesting explanatory landing pages for trainers on your site you want to keep the non-product ads targeted too. This could be a good use case for testing custom labels in Page Feeds.

Give it a try! Let me know what you think!

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How Do You Get a Full List of Website URLs? 

By the way, final note, how do you get a list of easy URLs? You can always start by asking your developer, but, you can likely find this with an easy yoursite.com/sitemap.xml, and then utilize a free XML to CSV converter tool to pull the row of URLs. Voila! Here is an example of one I snagged from Simple Modern (they have a few): 

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