Pmax automated: Segmenting bestsellers for even better sales

Your bestselling products already have a significant advantage: your audience loves them. However, there may still be untapped opportunities. By segmenting your bestsellers and launching separate campaigns, you can significantly boost their sales. Here’s how to make it happen.

Martin Sopf

January 20, 2025

Why “Bestseller” campaigns should be part of your performance strategy

The goal of a “Bestseller” campaign is not to replace the basic structure of your existing campaigns but to give extra attention to your bestsellers and extract even greater performance from them.

Benefits

Focus on top-performing products: Targets the best products in your business catalog, aiming to maximize their potential fully.
Data-driven and reactive structure: Relies on historical data rather than speculative decisions, making it a more accurate and effective strategy.

Downsides

Limited scalability: These campaigns are not easily scalable because the number of best-performing items is typically small.
Data dependency: If you previously relied solely on a single Performance Max campaign and many products were overlooked, there may not be enough historical data to set up this as a standalone campaign.

Choose how to identify your bestsellers

There are multiple ways to define your bestsellers, depending on the channel you’re analyzing. Here are your main options:

Google Analytics 4 or your CRM: Analyze sales data for your entire portfolio, regardless of the acquisition channel.
Meta: Identify bestselling products on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger.
Google Ads: Focus on top-performing products across Google’s advertising channels.
Meta + Google: Combine data from both performance channels to identify products that excel in your advertising campaigns.
Google Analytics 4 excluding Meta and Google: Pinpoint products that perform well on other channels beyond Meta and Google.

TIP: If you are segmenting based on Meta or Google Ads data, keep the following in mind: Meta bestsellers often perform well on Google Ads, making them a strong cross-platform opportunity. However, Google Ads bestsellers frequently don’t deliver the same results on Meta channels.

Number of sales vs. conversion value

When identifying bestsellers, you can focus on either the number of sales or the conversion value.

The number of sales highlights popular products with broad appeal, ideal for attracting new customers or driving repeat purchases.
Conversion value focuses on high-revenue items, perfect for optimizing profitability and maximizing returns on ad spend.

For the best results, consider a balanced approach: prioritize products with both high sales and high revenue, then tailor your campaigns based on your goals—boosting reach with popular items or driving profits with high-value products.

TIP: If you have sufficient conversion data, consider inluding the ROAS metric for each channel into your segmentation formula. A combination of a decent number of sales, high revenue, and sustainable ROAS can help identify products with the best possible performance. However, keep in mind that your campaigns should generate at least 30 conversions per month.

How structuring by Bestsellers could look like

Single campaign structure

If you don’t have enough conversions or products, it’s better to start with just one campaign. There are two different approaches to structuring your Asset Groups:

A single “All Bestsellers” campaign split by categories: In this approach, you select a specific number (e.g., XY) of your bestselling products and divide them into categories.
One campaign with “Best of Category” Asset Groups: Here, you take the top-performing products from each category (e.g., XY items per category), resulting in a larger number of products within a single campaign.

Multi-campaign structure

Instead of launching a single campaign, you can segment “best of category” products and place them into separate campaigns. For this approach, you’ll need to include more products; we recommend having at least 20 products in each category.

Segmenting by main categories can be beneficial, as it will result in more items per segment compared to segmenting by subcategories.

This approach also allows for more flexibility with bidding, as different categories may have varying targets or profit margins.

Setup in Dotidot

In this example, we will use a campaign structure based on overall sales data from Google Analytics 4. These campaigns will be organized by “best of category,” each with different ROAS targets. Basically it will look like this:

Campaign 1: Best of Sportswear - Top 10% items, ROAS set to 300%. Here, the products we offer fluctuate month to month, so using a percentage filter works best.
Campaign 2: Best of Nutrition - Top 100 items, ROAS set to 200% due to the inclusion of high-margin items developed by us.
Campaign 3: Best of Workout Accessories - Top 40 items, ROAS set to 400% as these products have low margins due to being resold from distributors. This category also contains way smaller inventory, this is why we select only 40 products.

STEP 1 - import additional product data from Google Analytics

At the very beginning, you need to have your overall data in your data source. With Dotidot this can be achieved pretty easily:

Navigate to “Data Sources,” select your data source for the future campaign, go to Data enrichment section and select Google Analytics 4
Choose your Google Analytics 4 account and, in the “Data Selection,” select the “item purchased” and “item revenue” metrics.
Don’t forget to select time ranges—longer periods will provide more valuable insights. For this example we need a 30 days time range.

Select not only metrics but also some mapping key, usually its Product ID

TIP: While a 30-day period can provide more accurate data, it may not offer enough information to reliably identify your bestsellers. You must strike a balance between having sufficient data and ensuring accuracy.

STEP 2 - Segmenting products

In this case we want to create product sets that filter out products based on the desired structure. So lets show how it’s done all three campaigns:

To filter out the top 10% of sportswear products, follow these steps:

Navigate to or stay in your data source
Go to Product sets section and click “+” button
Name this set 'Best of Sportswear' (or choose any name you prefer)
Select the conversion value metric 'ads_last_30d_conversion_value' (or use purchase metrics if you prefer the number of purchases)
Then, select Special Numbers -> Highest -> 10% (as shown in the image)
Save your product set.

This is what the correct condition looks like

Now, do the same for the 'Best of Nutrition' and 'Best Workout Accessories' product sets. The only difference is selecting 'Count' instead of 'Percent' and entering the number condition.

STEP 3 - Build the campaigns

The easiest part. Basically you only need to set up campaigns that combine your product set along with goals. So with our example:

Campaign 1: Best of Sportswear - “Best of Sportswear” product set, ROAS set to 300%.
Campaign 2: Best of Nutrition - Top 100 items product set, ROAS set to 200%.
Campaign 3: Best of Workout Accessories - Top 40 items product set, ROAS set to 400%.

You can also divide your asset groups into subcategories. For example, you might want to structure your asset groups for Sportswear into t-shirts, leggings, shorts, underwear, etc.

That's it! You've just launched your bestseller campaign strategy. May your Pmax thrive!