Lessons learned from a FULL year of running Performance Max for ecommerce & lead-gen

Episode Description

From complete enthusiasm to staunch opposition and everything in between, we’ve all now gone through a full year of Performance Max campaigns.

Many advertisers have tested the campaign type, ran experiments with it, and learned a lot in the process.

In this episode of PPC Town Hall, we spoke to Menachem Ani and Andrew Lolk, two PPC experts and practitioners in the industry to understand what they’ve learned from running Performance Max campaigns for a full year.

They’re going to cover a wide range of topics from structuring asset groups to attribution and negative keywords in Performance Max.

Tune in to learn:

- Performance Max lessons for ecommerce from Q4 of 2022

- How to structure asset groups

- Tips for lead-gen campaigns

and much more

Episode Takeaways

Performance Max lessons for ecommerce from Q4 of 2022

• Performance Max can behave similarly to smart shopping, maintaining performance even with significant budget changes during peak sales periods like Q4.
• For ecommerce, it’s crucial to manage Performance Max alongside standard campaigns, using specific strategies for country and product variations to optimize performance.

How to structure asset groups

• Asset groups should be structured around product categories or services, simplifying the campaign setup to align with business needs.
• Complex structures should only be used when they serve a specific business goal, like different product margins or budget allocations.

Tips for lead-gen campaigns

• Lead gen campaigns can benefit from value-based bidding like ecommerce by tracking leads’ progress through sales funnels and adjusting values accordingly.
• Connect CRM systems like Salesforce or HubSpot to Google Ads to improve lead quality assessment and campaign optimization based on actual sales data.

Additional Insights

• Audiences in Performance Max should be utilized to refine targeting, especially using existing customer data and high-performing search terms to enhance campaign effectiveness.
• Simplifying campaign structures can be beneficial, allowing the machine learning algorithms to better optimize based on consolidated data.

Episode Transcript

ANDREW LOLK: If you don’t care if you treat your account as a whole anyways Then performance max can do really well or the people who still today clinging on to, to, to control with audience, audience targeting what do you call it? Demographic targeting, state side targeting, not using any broad match, not using any phrase match, not using any dynamic search ads, performance max will increase your exposure and it will perform better than what you have today, meaning it will produce more revenue at a better ROAS, but you could have gotten that with, you could have gotten that with.

Anyways, however, if you’re not, if you don’t know these things and if you’re not at a proper size where you can pay somebody to do it, performance max is actually the best thing that ever happened to Google. Please don’t take that as a thing and put it on Twitter because that’s going to be.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Hello and welcome to another episode of PPC town hall.

My name is Fred Vallaeys. I’m your host. I’m also one of the co founders and the CEO. And Optmyzr. So today we’re going to talk about that topic that nobody seems to be getting enough of. And maybe some people do get enough of it, but that’s why those people aren’t watching, but we’re going to talk today about performance max, the new campaign type from Google.

That’s not so new anymore, but we still keep learning about it every day. As Google is automating more and more of what we used to do, how do we get the best results? And so we have two amazing experts who are going to join us today to talk about the B2B and the B2C angles. And how to make Performance Max drive the best results for you.

Or maybe we’ll find out that it doesn’t actually drive results. So, should be a great episode. Thanks for joining. Let’s get rolling with PPC Town Hall.

Alright, my two experts here today, Andrew and Menachem. Both of them have been on the show before. Both of them have talked about performance. performance max before. It’s great to have him back after a couple of months here. You know, some of the episodes that you guys did were some of the most watched and most popular we’ve had so far.

So Menachem, welcome back. How are things going?

MENACHEM ANI: Things are going pretty well. We’re always learning something new about performance max. I feel like Andrew mentioned this on Twitter performance max seems to be like, no matter how much you talk about it, people are dying for more knowledge. And there seems to be many, many different ways to kind of run a campaign and find success or, or like you mentioned, realize it doesn’t work for a certain account.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Okay. And yeah, you’ve done some great posts on search engine lens. So we’ll cover all of that. Andrew, yeah, I think you said it was your most popular tweet of the year was about the thing that shouldn’t be as popular as it was, but how are things going with you? It’s stupid.

ANDREW LOLK: So I think one of the things that, that, that we continue to learn and that is that the, the, the general.

Like perspective on performance max is it’s, it’s really appealing to like everybody, like agencies and in house and me as somebody who puts a lot of pride in what we do, I’m scared that there’s so many people who just want to go, yeah, let’s just put it on one campaign and run away from it. And I’ve really tried this year to like put some thoughts in as I’m, I’m an article coming out on why I think this is such a big issue and when it actually applies because like the way that we’ve looked at performance max this, this quarter is just, we can’t see it do what it says it does.

Like this whole, like, yes, the search and shopping, but this whole spiel with all of us having to put a lot of stuff, a lot of videos in there, a lot of images in there. And like, just, we just haven’t seen that produce any solid results for any of the ones we’ve actually run at any like significant scale.

So, so I think it’s, I think that’s, that’s, that continues to be an interesting point for me where like, does performance max do what we think it’s supposed to do? With all the things that, yeah, it says in terms of the video and display side.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Interesting. Interesting. So yeah, you might be playing bad cop here and Menachem may be a good cop.

We’ll, we’ll see how that goes. But to give listeners and viewers a little bit more perspective Menachem, remind people what you want to B2B, B2C, like who do you mostly work with? We

MENACHEM ANI: do, we do a good mix of both. So on the B2C side, a lot of e commerce, B2B, a lot of lead gen. And I think like to Andrew’s point, Performance Max is, is meant to be an all in one campaign, but it’s really not as simple as you would think it is.

It’s a very complicated campaign type and it doesn’t just work if you just set it up and go. It does require that, that deeper strategy.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Okay, so still no set it and forget it in PPC, which means all of you watching today managing PPC accounts Your jobs are safer at least at least a little while longer And Andrew what’s your business mostly looking at?

ANDREW LOLK: We we, we are a hundred percent direct to like business to consumer, B2C e-Commerce. I like to say we have a, we have a mix of the old fashioned e-commerce model of selling a bunch of different brands. And then we have another half that’s the D two C just single product, the Caspers, the Park War Parkers of the world.

Not that have that. We have those two, but that, that’s kind of the. Did two different types of we work with the most.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: So yeah, let’s let’s start on maybe Andrew on the e com side. We’ll start with you, but with Q4 now behind us you know, Q4 is always like a big quarter. There’s, you know, specific dates when the sales pick up, how did performance max do with that fluctuation and that big quarter, did it drive results?

Or were you still kind of relying on traditional shopping campaigns?

ANDREW LOLK: So, so, so the way that we’ve, so the way we structure a lot of campaigns. So, so we, I would say that half of what we do is performance max and half is standard shopping across the board under the, under the 40 different appetizers we work with and on the ones that are running like performance max, it more or less.

Perform just like we would, we saw smart shopping perform in the past. There was a little bit more fighting on, on what search actually ended up in performance max and what didn’t we, we tend to be proponents of of running the shopping only. performance max model. Just because the way that we typically run search and shopping for that matter is, is about getting as many insights as possible and treating every single keyword as a finite resources of finite resource of revenue.

So if we see that that a core keyword doesn’t perform very well, we want to find a way to make it perform. So lumping everything into one campaign doesn’t, doesn’t work well for the way that we typically work. With that being said, we obviously, we, we work in a lot of different countries in Europe where we, we will utilize a full on performance max setup just because launching in, let’s say you’re in Germany and the UK and then launching in the Netherlands, France and Spain, you can’t manage it all.

So in those countries will always add like just full on performance max campaign. And the way that we’ve seen it is that it tends to work just like every other campaign in Google. It really feels like it’s just a, it’s just a DSA with a smart shopping combined together. I have, haven’t yet seen any like true impact.

Or true evidence that performance max has some algorithms that smart bidding doesn’t have access to what it, it correlates this product, this URL and shopping with these search terms. So these needs to work together and search like, like that, that, that thing that I think could be the coolest thing ever to happen to search.

I don’t think the correlation is there yet, at least from what we’ve seen. So we, we still feel like that, that the biggest learning we’ve had in Q4 is that performance max, whether or not you treat it as a. Shopping and DSA combined or you treat it as just a shopping campaign can perform really well but treat it like you’ve always treated smart shopping and other things in terms of campaign overrides with seasonality bit adjustments and stuff like that

MENACHEM ANI: Menachem, what are what have you seen?

Yeah, so we’ve seen similar to to android definitely can Perform really well. It can scale really well. It’s like Black Friday looking at, you know, stark increases day over day, week over week. It really can perform well. But, you know, we, we have very similar setups where most of the clients that are selling their own branded private label product like direct to consumer.

Those are the ones where we’ll also add creative assets. We’ll take the top performing creative from the Facebook site and layer it on top. We do see that that can work well. But I think it has to have a solid base of data behind it from the search and shopping component of it. So it really has to understand who the consumer is.

But otherwise, like for the, for the clients that we serve that are selling, you know, products from hundreds of other brands, those, we typically tend to lean more towards the smart shopping style, but also with a healthy mix of standard shopping, we ideally, especially for larger accounts, don’t like to run pure performance max.

We’d like to layer on search shopping and another campaign types as well.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Right. So I think obviously A bigger advertiser is going to use all the traditional campaign types and then performance max may be one of the layers So I I don’t think there’s often the discussion of like what should we just do pmax?

Even google doesn’t recommend just pmax, right? It says this is in addition to your search and display campaigns yeah, I recommend that

MENACHEM ANI: yet, but they likely will recommend that at some point So,

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: so

MENACHEM ANI: you think they will actually start recommending just to PMAX? I think, I mean, so for smaller advertisers, we do do that, like with limited budgets, it’s Sometimes it can work better.

But it’s meant to be an all in one hit. All the placements. It’s just you lose a lot of insight. You lose a lot of control. You’re sort of feeding it

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: also qualified and for a minute what it means to perform better, right? So If you’re not going to measure any level of detail, if you’re not going to have time to do optimizations that are based off of those insights, then sure.

Fine. Whatever, but all my brand, my remarketing, all the cheap stuff, put it together with the expensive stuff. And you give me some sort of output at the end where nobody knows where it came from, but it looks cheap because Google may be,

ANDREW LOLK: we have like had a great example. We ran, we ran, like we took over an account last summer where they were running performance max.

And August we went in and I think it’s a DTC brand in the it is a DTC brand really narrow space. There wasn’t like the account hadn’t really gone anywhere. So it’s just, there was a couple of brand campaigns. Eight different agency. I tried eight different things last 10 years. Nothing had really worked all of a sudden they were they launched performance max right before we started and they’re like we really love it Well now we want to scale it and the more I looked into it All that happened in performance max was that it was branded search.

That’s all it was like it was like 500 out of a 10, 000 monthly spend that went to the shopping set up. Right. So when we went in and I went in and I moved I changed everything up. Standard shopping did some old fashioned keyword split because. That’s what we’ve seen work pretty well with getting something locked and like, so we don’t spread our data way too thin.

And I had the director of growth go in and just reactivate the performance max campaigns after a couple of months and specifically write a campaign name. Do not change Andrew. And I went like, no, no, no, no. Like why did you do that? And he’s like, no, they’re performing super well. I spoke to the CEO and we all agreed that we should do that.

Can you continue to run this? And I was like, somebody missed what I told you guys two months ago. So I explained how it all worked again. And that’s, that’s kind of like my pet peeve with this whole thing is that you can look like it can look like it’s performing really well. And sometimes it’s, it’s just taking in the brand and search.

Sometimes it’s taking in high performing search queries from your regular campaign. Sometimes it’s, it’s taking in. Like again, some, some things on the shopping side, it’s, it’s very, I’ve rarely seen that as a retargeting issue in this day and age it’s more like search intent that keeps being taken over.

And that’s really where, where I like to pull in the different differentiator there saying, if you don’t care, if you treat your account as a whole anyways. Then performance max can do really well or the people who still today clinging on to, to control with audience, audience targeting what do you call it, demographic targeting, stateside targeting, not using any broad match, not using any phrase match, not using any dynamic search ads.

Performance max will increase your exposure and it will perform better than what you have today, meaning it will produce more revenue at a better ROAS. But you could have gotten that with you could have gotten that with a proper setup anyways however If you’re not at if you don’t know these things and if you’re not at a proper size where you can pay somebody to do it Performance max is actually the best thing that ever happened to google Please don’t take that as a thing and put it on twitter because that’s going to be an issue for

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: me I mean and how unfair is this right?

So if you’re an agency and you like do all this Advanced structure. And then the client’s like calling you out and being like, well, how much of this is being driven by brand? And like, how much are you hijacking my SEO efforts by like using remarketing? And then you put P max in and it’s like, Oh my God, technology AI.

It’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. Like Google’s doing amazing. And it’s like, no, you should be asking it the same questions and putting it through the same standards. Right. But Andrew, you sort of brought up a great point and I’d love to hear from a knock him on this. If you make the argument, like Should we just get the best results from the account?

Like, why is that not a good thing? Like, how do you argue to a client that there is something better than just like this one campaign that gets pretty good results?

MENACHEM ANI: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know from my perspective. It’s like, yeah, it can get pretty good results, but it won’t necessarily get pretty good results.

And if, if you hire an agency that specializes in it, you’ll likely get better results. I’ve seen many cases where performance max was just set up with a basic shopping feed or whatever, and they’re missing the fundamentals, like the audience signal to guide it to who it should show it to the proper titles, descriptions, or taxonomy in the data feed.

So the system doesn’t really understand. What you’re selling at the end of the day, it’s just cycling through clicks and money and not driving, grabbing you. So it could work, but it could also fail miserably. And so you kind of need something more.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: And I mean, it’s one of the angles here that if you have one performance max campaign and you set it to a target return on ad spend, that’s kind of like average for your whole business.

Like, is it okay to sell a bunch of socks at a loss? And that’s made up for by the TVs that you sell at a profit. Like is that cool? Because yeah, sure. That’s going to maximize your revenue. But for the people not watching but listening like I see Andrew shaking his head. So Andrew, what do you think?

ANDREW LOLK: No, and it’s like it’s a it’s it’s it’s like it’s one of those things like it’s it it sounds fine in in in the It sounds fine.

It’s not that big of a deal, but the problem with like, so you have a high margin product on a low margin product running on the same rows target. You’re never competing on, like, I just, I just did an audit on this yesterday. You you’re not competing. Like your high margin product is not competing because.

The high margin product that you have might be if that’s like, that’s not all you sell. So some of your competitors, that’s all they sell and they know what their margin is. So they’ll set the lower raw start for their, for the exact same product or the same exact same category. So you can’t, you’re, you’re at a disadvantage right there and you’re overpaying for, for, for sale, for transactions or for revenue on the lower margin side.

So just there, you have an issue with doing that. That can be easily fixed by just either running profit bidding or just splitting up your performance max campaigns. The bigger issue with lumping it all together is, is something we’ve seen with, with brand bidding and smart bidding. So if you have a branded term, you just put smart bidding on it and you put it at a 500 percent ROAS, it’s not gonna stop bidding when it like, if it’s at 2000 percent ROAS, it’s going to continue bidding higher and higher and higher and higher and higher.

And we, we’ve just routinely taken, especially in house accounts and just gone like, Hey, Let’s push your, let’s push your branded terms to manual bidding. And that’s the, that’s the, and then it just reduces the CPC greatly. And it’s the same thing that happens inside of performance max. So when you have a bunch of like branded terms and stuff like that, they will overpay for your highest performing search terms.

Sometimes it’s not a big problem, but for, especially for high volume accounts, that can be.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Right. And so this is all an auction, right? Second price auction. So why would someone overpay on the brands if you keep raising the bid? Explain that a little bit.

ANDREW LOLK: Oh, so that’s, that’s, that’s a very, very good question.

It took me a long time to be able to explain in a simple manner. And part of it is your brand term in and of itself. Isn’t bit that high. So let’s say Optmyzr. Optmyzr, just Optmyzr is not that expensive to run on, but Optmyzr PPC tool that you can potentially buy. I don’t know what it is, but let’s say you can buy it for 5 per click at the lowest and you still get in top four, decent CTR, decent traffic.

But let’s say you have a super high ROAS on that and Google will then say, Hey, our smart branding, we’ll say, let’s buy it. That needs to be a bit much higher. So we’re trying to get it in. So Google or smart bidding will bid that into the top one position. So we’ll start competing against PPC optimization tool, which I guess we’ll have 20, 30, 40, 50 CPCs.

And that’s where that will then pull your overall brand spend exceedingly high, like your brand combined with trust pilot has. 100 CPC is ridiculous if, if you, if you set it that high and it’s, it’s, that’s where it will pull out a lot, a lot.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Exactly. And then I guess that gets us back into the whole discussion of having a little bit more control being able to maybe set some targets based on return on ad spend, based on internal business goals that we have, whereas if you just say like, here’s the brand and bid it to any degree that you want, it just captures everything.

MENACHEM ANI: We take a very similar approach for branded campaigns because like it has a different business goal for branded keywords. Your goal is to make sure they don’t land on a competitor website and you lose the sale. And so if you cap, if your ad shows up a hundred percent of the time. That’s your business goal.

So we like either manual CPC or target impressions here for that. But, but to Andrew’s point is like once, once you reach 90%, 100 percent of your, your pure brand keyword, if you’re on target row as a smart bidding, the system will keep trying to get more and it will start to veer away from your actual brand towards those other keywords.

And it has a different business goal

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: and then in performance. Yeah, even

ANDREW LOLK: even even Even if it doesn’t do like just just to expand on that And that’s where again, it’s not a performance max issue This is this this is this is just as much as brand versus non brand issue like again, if if you’re a branded term that you that that it lets run at a 2000 percent ROAS and it lets generic run at a hundred percent ROAS and they kind of balances it out for the naked eye.

That means you’re hitting a 200, 000 revenue a month at a, at, at your target ROAS. But you’re, you’re not paying, you’re not, you’re not being profitable on the generic aspect that you’re having all of your brand, which you have built up there. I, as a marketer, let me rephrase that me as a PPC marketer can take zero credit.

For your branded for your branded terms. There’s nothing like, and I know some of the people on my team argue against that, but as a whole, there are some gray areas, but as a whole, I can’t take any credit whatsoever. So if I pay 200, like if I have a 200 percent ROAS on a generic term and it’s unprofitable, but I have a 2000 percent ROAS on my branded term that doesn’t even out again, there’s a gray area and some attribution and stuff like that.

But as a whole, that doesn’t even out. So I don’t want smart bidding, and I’m trying to be very hard to say, to not say Google, because I think that’s a whole, smart bidding does this, where it tries to even it out, and it shouldn’t. It’s two different entities.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: All right, so yeah, Andrew, that’s super interesting.

Let’s talk a little bit about attribution, which is one thing you talked about, right? So how do you figure out that your brand keyword is going across all these other searches? And then there’s also the big conversation about negative keywords in Performance Max, which you can ask your rep to put in. But Menachem, any, any thoughts on attribution and negative keywords?

MENACHEM ANI: Yeah, I mean, as far as attribution, we typically optimize campaigns based on the in platform, the Google Ads attribution. We like data driven because it, it attributes revenue across multiple touchpoints from Google Ads. Within performance max campaigns, blocking brand search, again, it’s something that varies, like the typical answer, it depends.

For, for really small accounts, I don’t like to bother with it because it’s another signal the system kind of needs, but as you get bigger and you’re spending more, especially when there is a lot more brand search volume, you really want to make sure that they get segmented because otherwise, like Andrew mentioned, you’re, you’re paying a much higher cost per click than you need to, to capture the brand search.

And, and you’d rather focus that budget on, on new customer acquisition at a more profitable level.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: So negative brand keywords, yes or no. Depends. Depends. Okay. Andrew?

ANDREW LOLK: Yes. Yes, I agree. It depends. But if, if, if anybody needs a clear answer, then yes, but definitely

MENACHEM ANI: cases where it doesn’t matter. And the one thing I would just tell you is that by blocking a negative brand brand keywords from performance max, aside from launching a branch a search campaign, you also need to launch a shopping campaign.

So that your, your ads show up on the shopping listings as well. Cause otherwise, if you just exclude from performance max and launch search, you’ll be missing out the shopping placement for branded keywords.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Negative generic keywords in P max. Yes or no. And I know it depends,

MENACHEM ANI: but I don’t like to do much.

Unless we see something clearly is off base, but I don’t really like to.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: So I’ve heard some people say that putting negatives like, let’s talk about negative keywords negative keywords that are much more specific than positive keywords, right? So they tend to like, if you put negative flowers, that means that if the word flowers appears in the search, that’s when it becomes excluded.

If somebody puts roses in the search, that is a broad match. To flowers, but as a negative, it does. It’s not negative problem. It’s negative exact by and large, right? They might be singular, but it’s, it’s got to be pretty close. So, like, does that seem to work differently in P max? Like, are we limiting the system too much from exploring and finding things by putting in?

Generic negative keywords,

ANDREW LOLK: like, I think, I think if, if, if you’re going to the PMAX route, then like, I have this whole thing. Like, I love different people doing different things in, in, in PPC and with PMAX, if you do a, you have to do B and you have to do C. If you do PMAX, you have to do smart bidding. You have to stop doing negative keywords.

Like, like it’s like you’ve, you’ve chosen a route, commit. Because you don’t, you don’t get the search term data even, I even feel like overall negative keywords is not the valuable anymore, but again, it depends. But if you, if you do performance max, don’t do negative keywords, it’s like there’s no need to, you can’t see the data per se anyway.

So you end up guessing. And if you’re guessing for negative keywords, that can hurt a lot more than you think, because you don’t see if you have accidentally added Let’s say flowers for a flower delivery company, and you forgot to put it as a, as an exact match negative, because that’s what you’re used to doing.

And so you’re going to hurt a lot more than you, than you do, than you think

MENACHEM ANI: in my view. Yeah, I tend to agree with that also, because with performance max, it should on its own with smart bidding, if it doesn’t hit your goals, it should automatically stop serving for whatever traffic it is. So if it sends traffic for flowers, and it doesn’t convert, it should just stop on its own.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Right. And the big question is always like, how long until it learns and it decides that it’s statistically significant before it stops spending another thousand dollars towards that keyword. Right. And then, and then ultimately, if you look at it, well, I was going to say, this is the frustration that people have.

Right. It’s like, yes, at the end of the day, this perform, this campaign type gives you good enough performance, but like, how often does it go down a rabbit hole of trying something that you could have said, like, yeah, we didn’t need to spend a thousand dollars to learn that. I already could have told you that.

MENACHEM ANI: Right. I think that’s the tricky part with scaling performance max. As you increase the budgets, it looks for new keywords, new audiences, new places to show your ads. And then it kind of goes through that learning phase. Typically when they’re in a stable place, spending similar amounts on a daily basis, I find that it doesn’t do as much of that once it finds its group.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: And did you find that to be a problem in Q4 when like the budgets typically get raised?

MENACHEM ANI: Not as much because conversion rates are increased then search volume is increased then so like you have the room to spend more. So you’re basically increasing

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: the budget to capture more of the same that’s now available but you don’t have to go searching for new stuff.

Exactly. That makes sense. Hey, let’s shift the conversation here to a little bit more lead gen. I guess we’ve talked a lot about e commerce. Now, one thing that I always find curious is like if you’re in lead gen, people think, oh, I shouldn’t do target return on ad spend. I shouldn’t be value based bidding.

Do you have a take on that? And like, are, is e commerce, Legion actually kind of more similar to e commerce than people think

MENACHEM ANI: I think it is because ultimately the closer the system gets to Your business profitability the better job it can do like for example, if you go use target, customer acquisition target cpa You’re telling the system you’ll pay x amount of dollars for every lead But the system doesn’t know the difference between crappy leads, good leads, you know, sales qualified, just spam form fills, whatever it is.

And so if you can use value based bidding with Target ROAS, it’ll definitely work better. And there’s a lot of ways to get there. But basically, you want to feed the system on what does a good lead look like somebody you can actually sell your product to service to. If you can give it that data, Target ROAS can work really well.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: I totally agree. So how? What do you do?

MENACHEM ANI: So, I mean, at a very basic level, if you don’t have your sales data coming into Google Ads, you can basically score the different lead types. Maybe phone calls are worth more than form submissions or chats. But in an ideal world, you want to connect your CRM. If you use Salesforce or HubSpot, there’s, there’s built in integrations where you can as a lead progresses through your, your sales pipeline, you can give it different values or different conversion actions in Google ads and bid towards that.

If you don’t have Salesforce or HubSpot, you can use a tool like Zapier to connect and build. Basically, as let’s say you collect the lead, you spoke them on the phones and now it’s like a sales qualified lead, you can mark that as a milestone as a conversion in Google ads. And then as the lead progresses, you can assign different values or real sales value.

Once you close the deal, you can pipe that data back into Google ads and tell it, you know, this lead turned into 1, 000 in revenue, and then it’ll use that for target ROAS based bidding.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Right. Important question. Is it Zapier

MENACHEM ANI: I always say Zapier, but honestly, who knows? I don’t know.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: I’m listening to this other great podcast and it’s, it’s about company names that people mispronounce.

And I actually also don’t know what the right one is. So if anyone knows, love to hear. No, but so that makes total sense, right? So you’re saying basically too many companies, they look at the conversion event as the form being filled out on the page. That’s the lead. And then it sort of stops at that point.

Now you did talk about. As you start capturing this into your CRM, you have two options. You can either create new conversion actions as the lead progresses down the funnel, or you can restate the existing lead and update its value, or you can even retract a conversion using. Do you have a preference between creating more conversion actions or restating an existing one?

MENACHEM ANI: So I like to create additional actions. So this way you can actually visualize it in Google Ads. You can put in different columns or segment your conversion. So you can see how, how many leads progress through the funnel, through the different steps and assign the values there. And definitely a good idea to negate.

The poor lead. So the system doesn’t keep going after those type. Okay. When

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: you say negate, you mean like retract sort of like longer. Okay. What? What sort of time frames do you typically use? So? So I have heard from Google that really The changes made in two to three days of the original conversion.

That is what the machine learning prefers pays most attention to. Now that’s kind of counter to what Google then says, which is you have 90 days to import an OCI and you have 55 days to restate something on a transaction ID. So is it completely meaningless to do things at

MENACHEM ANI: day 85? I don’t think it’s completely meaningless.

We still do it. We like to send as much data as possible. Obviously the, the. More transaction volume you’re dealing with, the better it’ll do. You know, if you only have a few leads, it’s much harder for the system. But once you have a lot of data, it’s much easier. But we just try to send as much data as possible.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: And Andrew, what does that look like on your side? You know, I know maybe a little bit more e commerce, but like lifetime value, and then is that something you play with or like. Returns, refunds, accounting for shipping costs, like, because ultimately what we’re talking about here is communicating a correct and realistic value to Google, conversion value.

What does that look like in your business? The,

ANDREW LOLK: It varies from industry to industry apparel. You have to, you have to somehow measure in returns. Some, some countries, especially if, if like certain countries in Europe, like Germany can have up to 60 percent returns. So you need it built into the system somehow.

Other than that, like our go to is, is the profit based bidding. Simply just getting the profit from each transaction. So you, you get it right then and there. So most of the systems that work with that will also, you can also do some kind of returns or canceled orders. Overall, we see it’s, it’s less, it’s less of an issue.

With e commerce though if you get the profit Part included that’s really that’s really the biggest thing for anyone who sells Products that have various margins if you don’t have very like varying margins It doesn’t matter that much and i’m good friends with frederick who runs one of these companies And he hates when I say it, but That’s like, if you have different margins, it’s the, yeah, if it, if it like different margins, it’s the best thing in the world.

You can’t live without it. We’ve tried to turn it off, turning it on, on account. It’s just, it’s the best thing in the world. But if you’re selling a mattress, you have 60 percent margin on that mattress. Getting the profit in doesn’t really.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: And then in, in your sort of line of business, so you’re saying reporting the profit of the sale, that’s an instantaneous process. What about returns? Would you, after 30 days, like retract the conversion if it was fully returned or still restate the value? Or is there sort of a cutoff point at which you find the machine?

Just. Doesn’t care what happens after day X.

ANDREW LOLK: Well, what we have a tough time actually like completely actualizing what the impact is, but like, I’ll, I’ll make it a little bit what you’ve been told. Like it, it, it is supposed to know that if you constantly. Have take a negate 20 percent of the conversions after 30 days.

It should take that into account moving forward until it gets other data. So if, if there is a lack of negated conversions in the last 30 days, but the 30 days prior to that, There were 20 percent negated. It will still work based off saying, Hey, it’s expecting the negated conversions to come. Right. So you’re saying that it’s actually

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: starting to build prediction models from sort of your late feedback.

So it now says, Oh, on day one of this conversion happening, I’m just, I have to expect it’s going to be 20 percent decrease in value because usually Andrew reports that’s 20 percent decline after 30 days. I’m not, I’m really curious from you. Right. I think, I think in lead gen. One of the biggest problems is like, how do you figure out quickly?

What is the value of a lead? I mean, if this is a six month sales cycle, we’re now way past what you can tell Google. So, but you still want to communicate something like, have you found a good way to predict this? Or do you just use like actual values?

MENACHEM ANI: I think that’s where like the different funnel steps come into play.

Like we do work. Across a lot of different industries. But I think legal is the biggest one where you might not see a settlement or revenue from it for like 12 to 18 months. And so what we measure is just the progression of, you know, from that initial contact form submission or phone call, does it turn into the next step in the funnel and the next step in the funnel?

Obviously with, with lead gen campaigns that turn over much faster, shorter sales cycle, it’s less of a problem, but if we can score it, like, you know, give a score of, of 10, 20, 30, 40 to each step in the funnel, Even if it’s still far away from, you know, the end sale, that helps a lot.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: All right. So the next topic that I’d love to talk about is audiences. The, so performance max campaigns, obviously you can attach audiences to it. One of them being your existing customers so that you can have a focus on new customer acquisition. But what, what is your strategy and what have you seen working with audiences.

I mean, I have a let’s start with you. Sure,

MENACHEM ANI: sure. So typically I don’t like to run any performance max without an audience signal. Again, it’s not true targeting. It’s really just telling the system like this is who I believe my customer is. So we like to start with attaching your existing customer list also so you can do new customer acquisition, but additionally so that it can target similar people.

And then we try to find like the top converting search terms, build an audience around that certain demographics, layer on whatever you can and, and whatever other first party data you have, email lists, lead lists, you know, things, things of that nature can really help a lot too.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: And then, so when you say it helps a lot,

MENACHEM ANI: I mean, it, it kind of kickstarts it faster or pushes it in a different direction, like for brand new performance max, we’ve seen that it could take like four to six weeks to really hit its stride.

So putting strong audience signals, help it. Get in front of the right consumer faster, especially with lead gen, but also with e commerce and like also if you find that you’re not getting the performance you need, switching out the audience signals, it’s again, it’s just a signal, but it pushes the system in a different direction can help you reach the right consumers faster.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Have you found any and entered this for you, Bob? Google is so big on like, Oh my God, this new campaign type has all these amazing insights that you don’t get in traditional campaigns. Like have any of these insights amongst them audiences helped you actually discover something that you were able to do something with?

MENACHEM ANI: Oh, it’s definitely interesting data. I think it’s similar to what we see, like in, in Google analytics, like they show a lot of underlying audience data, similar to that does help push you in another direction. You go like, Oh, I didn’t realize these kinds of people would be interested in our product or our service.

So definitely it’s helpful.

ANDREW LOLK: No, like I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m more pessimistic on audiences than any, than like, than, and it’s more because like this, like, I just feel like there’s maybe it’s because of the types of accounts we work with that they, they, for the general search and shopping perspective, people are searching for the product.

They just are. And like, well, now they’re in a luxury segment or a newspaper segment. So I guess if you have already existing accounts where all this learning has already taken, taken place, that’s where I feel like the, the value of audiences for the regular overall search and shopping efforts are not as impactful as I would want them to be.

I, I still feel like that. Audience overlap, when you go in and you look at the audience manager and you like, you can see what audiences your conversions actually like your converted users, what audiences they appear in. And sometimes you’re like, wow, that would be amazing. I’ll take this, I guess, like a 12 X index on newspaper readers.

So you put in newspaper readers and your regular campaigns, you go like, yeah, nothing happened. And I always get, I always get disappointed. And I think like I spoke to what is a little a big a, I always forget his name. Aaron. I remember. Yeah. I spoke to him at Berlin about this as well. And he was like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

He also went back and forth on it, but, but underlined like where they had seen a ton of success and then we see kind of the same thing is like, The broader searches, the more generic searches, the ones you couldn’t touch before layering them with audiences. That’s where it starts becoming, becoming powerful.

And that’s where I can also see, okay, maybe Pmax can actually utilize that to like branch out to like searches that it wouldn’t normally be able to perform on to actually generate a return on. By doing that because that’s what we see in the regular search and shopping campaigns. We’re able to do but as a whole i’m I always get disappointed with with audiences.

I feel like there was I feel google could do so much more

MENACHEM ANI: Yeah but I think that’s a good point because the the more you are in the core search and shopping the less the audience really matters Because you have the keyword intent But as you move towards broader keywords, but I think where performance max finds audience useful is when you take your top performing creative from like Facebook and Instagram ads and run that in performance max, so it’s less about around keywords more around display.

That’s where the audience signals can really help a lot more to help it find the right consumer.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: All right, so mix some people like it. Some people don’t as with everything, it should be more. Yeah, it depends. Good. Final topic is asset groups. How do you like to run asset groups in your performance max campaigns?

You use a lot of them. Very few. Menachem I heard you say that sometimes you get these insights about maybe a new audience that you didn’t expect. And it’s actually really interested in your product. Does that lead to more asset groups with different creatives?

MENACHEM ANI: What’s the strategy around all

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: of that?

MENACHEM ANI: Yeah, I mean, we typically tend to build campaigns and asset groups or even in standard search and shopping ad groups around product categories or product, you know, specific product services or categories. It’s very similar in performance max to that. And I think the only time we would really. Segment the same product or service into multiple asset groups with different audience signals.

If we believe that there needs to be very different messaging around it. But otherwise, it’s typically around the product or service

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: around products or service. Makes sense. And then obviously you put in the different creatives based on what that product or services.

MENACHEM ANI: Correct.

ANDREW LOLK: Andrew.

It’s a, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a category brand or, or some kind of creative push, like, and then I always say this don’t overcomplicate it if you’re not going to create different creative. So don’t like, don’t create an asset group for Nike and another one for Adidas and another one for Reebok. If you’re gonna write save 70 anyways in all three Like like we see it all the time like people just over complicating setups and then not actually using that complication to more granular structure for anything really so Do it as complicated as you need to to serve your creative purposes like and targets and stuff like that I agree with

MENACHEM ANI: that 100

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah structure has to be driven by business needs not just like You Because you think you can beat the machine at doing some things by just, yeah, it was also an interesting thread on Twitter recently about the conversion data that’s used by machine learning is all triggered off of, or the predictive mechanisms look at the conversion action and the conversion action tends to live either at the MCC, the account or the campaign level, and it’s all the data from that goes into the conversion.

So it doesn’t really matter how many asset groups or ad groups you have. Right. All of it feeds to like, does this thing convert or not? And then it’s, it’s like, does that conversion correlate to a certain query? Does it correlate to a specific audience? And that’s where it starts to feed and learn. But you can’t beat the machine by adding more levels of granularity.

But I see Andrew wagging his finger. So

ANDREW LOLK: yeah, because that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s one thing that, that we’ve like really changed our mind on, or I’ve changed my mind on the last six months because like Responsive search ads has been has been killing us a little bit because the the way that that that The more I look into it The more it appears that the more data you push into a responsive search ad the more it will use Conversions instead of just ctr and impressions to define what is a good Good converting asset.

And that has really made us just go like, yeah. So our goal for the future is not to structure campaigns based on how we like to structure them. It’s about how much traffic can we push into a single responsive search ad while still having the ads still make sense. Right. That’s, that’s something we’re testing at the moment and that’s.

It’s like, we’re hoping we’re seeing some initial good results but it’s going to be really interesting to see if that actually works.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: So if I’m hearing you correctly, you’re saying flatten your structure and reduce your complexity to get as much impressions through a single RSA, which then consolidates conversions.

If you were to use the same RSA across multiple ad groups, are you testing whether that builds up enough volume for it to learn?

ANDREW LOLK: We’ve tried that in the past and we just don’t we don’t see a we don’t see a direct correlation between the different RSA some sometimes sometimes there’s a correlation but it’s more been like an accident that the same that the same assets actually perform the best and the same and the different ones than than anything really and it’s like one of our biggest things is because like if if I put in a safe 70 percent in any asset In any responsive search ad, that’s going to get the number one impressions.

And that’s not the one that converts the best. I know like from all the last 10 years on expanded text ads, we know that’s not the case in all cases, but it will always have the highest CTR. So, so the more it pushes like a message that has a high CTR, and I know you and I are different on that, Fred, about whether or not an ad should actually.

cause a conversion or it should cause a click. I’m in the heavy camp that it should cause a conversion. So, so the more, again, the more we drive into a single responsive search ad, you feel it will focus more on conversions.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah. I don’t know where you think I fall on this, but like, obviously the, I think the ad should cause the click with a probability of converting down the line, but that’s the landing pages job, right?

ANDREW LOLK: Yeah. Yeah, your support and your support staff in in Optmyzr says the same thing. Well, I’ve created them well.

MENACHEM ANI: I’m a big proponent for simplicity over complexity. We try to use as few campaigns as possible while still supporting the overall business structure. Like, there’s got to be a good case for it, you know, separate budgets, separate goals, separate, separate whatever but not just to overcomplicate it. I feel like people do that.

They, they create complexity for no reason. And it’s much harder for the algorithm or the, the smart bidding to have enough data within each subset.

ANDREW LOLK: But it was so pretty when we used to do it, it was so pretty. We could have, like, we could have Nike shirts, we could have Nike short sleeve shirts. We have night Nike long sleeve shirts and all the URLs fixed to the right places.

And we showed the keyword in the ad and it was so pretty. And yesterday I was wa, two days ago I was, I was doing a coaching call and I just, I looked at. The account was like, yeah, we’re just going to go like this. And we just shrink like 80 different ad groups into 10 or just like, we need more data and individual ad groups.

So I’ve learned

MENACHEM ANI: not to fight the system. I’ve learned not to fight progress. You take the tools we have today and just make it work the best we can.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Exactly. And then hopefully it still comes down to like, listen, if you have a business reason, like different product margins, or you have to allocate different budgets to different things throughout different seasons, like that’s why you add complexity and structure to have access to that.

You know, I am scared of a world where everything becomes super flat. And again, but that’s what we’re hearing, like performance max, you could technically run one campaign. It would seem like it’s producing good results, but when you ask, start asking questions, like, is it really doing that? And that’s, that’s the big question.

And you know, thank you both for kind of like weighing in on this. And I think we’re we’re going to have to do another episode as we all continue to learn what really happens. So I’d love to have final thoughts from each of you or just where people can find you. Menachem, I know you write for Search Engine Land, great posts on their own performance, Max, Andrew, I love your periodic emails I get in my inbox and the blog posts you do as well, so tell people where to find you and how to follow up.

Andrew, let’s go with you first.

ANDREW LOLK: Oh, I think I think the the biggest thing is so i’m big on twitter twitter So i’ll i’ll be a lot more andrew on twitter and i’ll be corporate andrew on linkedin on both places One is a lot cleaner than the other the more clients we get from twitter the more clean my twitter will be but I hope we won’t get that many clients From twitter so I can continue being myself there a lot more a lot more sassy, than anything really so a lot more a lot more You Honest takes on, on Twitter of and on LinkedIn.

But other than that, I just wanted like one final note on, on the whole Performance Max thing is like, I just, I really think it’s, it’s just important that people treat Performance Max from like, really what you said Fred, like it’s, it’s, it’s about figuring out what’s your business strategy and what do you have available in front of you.

If, if you don’t have the competencies or time or resources or if you’ve been burned by one agency after the other, performance Max can be a great option. But if you have some competence, if you have the resources to actually build out more in terms of account structure and stuff like that, you can get more out of an account.

You can get more out of search by producing, by building out a setup, but it should fit into your business strategy. It’s not a one size fit all. It shouldn’t always be. Test it, but if it works really well, sometimes, sometimes it does. It really depends what you have internally to, to build it out. And I always recommend early, early advertisers, just run performance max.

Like just, just get, get some data in. That’s better than anything you can really ever do. Then you can figure it out down the line.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Okay. We’ll get some smart people and SavvyRevenue has a few of those. So. That’s always an option.

MENACHEM ANI: All right, Menachem, what about you? Sure, I think my closing thoughts would be that You know, mirroring what Andrew is saying is Performance Max is a great place to start.

It is a lot more complicated than it would seem if you don’t have the right data input. So you just want to make sure you’re able to set it up right and give it the right data feed, give it the right parameters to get you the success and it should be able to do it for you. But yeah, take the time to set it up right and it should, it should do well.

And how do people you?

MENACHEM ANI: Sure, sure. You can find me in the same places. I’m on Twitter. I’m on LinkedIn, Menachem Ani. I’m always trying to share knowledge and everything we’re doing. There’s a lot to learn. I feel like every day there’s something new with Performance Max. So just try to share what we’re learning along the way.

And if people want a quote for getting some help, where do they go? Sure. You just visit our website, jxtgroup. com. Always happy to help. All right.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Well, thank you both. Thank you everyone for watching. If you’ve enjoyed the episode, we’re going to have many more to come. So subscribe on our channel. And if you need some help with managing PPC, we have a great tool called Optmyzr.

We’ve got a two week free trial. So go ahead and sign up for that. See what we can do. Talk to our amazing support staff like Andrew. I don’t know if they’re amazing, if you agree with the advice they give.

ANDREW LOLK: I’m happy every time.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Okay. No, we get really great marks. So we have a bunch of smart people there as well.

So check it out. But thanks all for watching. Thanks for joining us to the panelists. I will see you for the next PPC time.