Performance Max Campaigns: Expert Tips & Best Practices From PPC Practitioners

Episode Description

In this episode, we spoke to top #PerformanceMax practitioners — the people who are actually using this new campaign type every day.

They shared their experiences, tips, and best practices from their experiments.

You will learn:

• How Performance Max performed against other campaign types
• How to deal with cannibalization with existing campaigns
• Performance Max Campaign optimization tips
  and more

Episode Takeaways

Performance Max Performance Against Other Campaign Types:

• Performance Max campaigns offer a highly automated approach, replacing Smart Shopping and local campaigns with the aim of optimizing across multiple Google channels.
• Experiences vary significantly among users; some find Performance Max to offer substantial improvements over previous campaign types, particularly in automation and reach, while others miss the granularity and control of traditional setups.

Dealing with Cannibalization with Existing Campaigns:

• Performance Max campaigns can potentially cannibalize existing campaigns, particularly when not enough budget is allocated to fully fund all campaign types.
• Users should monitor their campaign overlaps carefully and consider strategic use of budget and targeting to minimize unwanted cannibalization. Understanding how Performance Max interacts with existing campaigns in terms of budget and keyword targeting can help mitigate this issue.

Performance Max Campaign Optimization Tips:

• Begin by clearly defining the goals and conversion actions for the campaign to ensure that Google’s automation aligns with business objectives.
• Utilize asset groups strategically to test different creatives and messaging, refining these based on performance data provided by Google.
• Consider experimenting with segmenting campaigns by product or service lines to optimize for different ROI targets, using insights from asset performance to influence broader marketing strategies.

Episode Transcript:

Frederick Vallaeys: Hello and welcome to another episode of PPC Town Hall. My name is Fred Vallaeys. I’m your host. I’m also the co founder and CEO at Optmyzr. So we recently did a session where we brought in Google and we got them to talk about Performance Max campaigns. Performance Max campaigns are a little bit the buzz in the industry these days.

It’s a new campaign format that’s very automated. It is going to take over for local campaigns, for smart shopping campaigns. So people are obviously asking a lot of questions because this is a forced migration. For some people. And we want to understand how do these campaigns work? What’s going to change?

What do we need to do? So we got the word from Google. We got a lot of great answers. But as we were doing that session, the questions just kept rolling in on the live chat. So we wanted to go a little bit deeper. And address many of those questions that we didn’t have a chance to answer the last time.

For that, we didn’t want to talk to Google. We wanted to talk to some practitioners who’ve actually used Performance Max campaigns and who’ve experimented and done some pretty nifty things. So we’ve got a great set of panelists today and let’s get rolling here with another episode of PPC Town Hall.

All right. So let’s bring in the guests here and say hello to them. So you saw who they are, but we have a couple of returning folks. All right. So there we go. So we have Andrew. Welcome back. We have Antonia, first timer on PPC Town Hall. We’ve got Brooke. What is this, your second episode, I think?

Brooke Osmundson: I think

Frederick Vallaeys: so. And then Duane, I think you’ve got like three or four, right? So we’ve got a good crew here. But let’s quickly introduce yourselves and remind people who you are. And what makes you a PPC expert? I’ll go from the top left. So Andrew, we’ll start with you.

Andrew Lolk: Yeah, my name is my name is Andrew.

I’m from I’m originally from, from Denmark. So, so we have experiences across both Europe and the U S all we do is e commerce PPC and. We are very focused on, I think 70 percent of our business is like what we call this retail e commerce, so not direct to consumer. So, so most of the experience that I’ll bring today is more on the retail side, meaning a lot, a lot, like thousands and thousands of products.

So we’ll, we’ll put that into that context throughout the day. Yeah. People who are doing smart shopping, definitely highly impacted by this change. So. Can’t wait to hear what you know, Antonia, you’re next in line. So welcome for the first time to town hall. The reason I wanted to invite you was you did that performance max session with Google and people were asking all these questions and.

Frederick Vallaeys: I feel like you were the one giving all the answers. So we’re like, wow, we got, we got to bring Antonia on and have everyone hear directly from her. So tell us where you are and what you do.

Antonia Vasile: So I’m Antonia. So I’m from Italy. I’m working in Italy, but mainly working with the United States and Northern Europe, something with Italy also.

What I do as a professional and as a Google partner, I’m working mainly with e commerces, same as Andrew’s doing in the retail area. And managing mostly big e commerces In the electronics area, mostly and furniture. So everything what I can share. It’s about this movement from smart shopping to performance, but that’s actually scaring everybody away due to something related to reporting and every other kind of stuff related to Google Analytics for coming into model into play soon.

So everybody, it’s a little bit scared about this transition. My, my big luck is that I’m having some internal help from Google with some very precious advices regarding how this movement should be done, mainly because my clients are mostly using smart shopping campaigns on huge inventories. So losing to us at that point would be a catastrophe.

So I’m here to, to share what I will do for my clients. What I will do. So I am going to share that with you.

Frederick Vallaeys: Great. Can’t wait to hear all the advice. Dwayne as, as you’re coughing I’m going to have you speak.

Duane Brown: It’s okay. That’s okay. Yeah, my name is Dwayne. I’m based in Canada. Most of our clients are American or UK European.

And then we, 95 percent of e commerce and DTC brands. So everything from brands with four SKUs to a hundred thousand SKUs, and then most of our clients run ads across. North America, Europe. And then a lot of clients are finding some success in APAC. And I think APAC is kind of interesting because it’s often not the place you see a lot of North American or European brands go, but there’s people with money down there.

It’s a totally different market, especially as strong as not as competitive. So I’m going to bring that perspective of both clients have got like retail stores, don’t have retail stores, lots of skews, little skews. I think there’s a lot going on with PMAX and I’m, I’m personally excited about the change, but I know it’s scaring a lot of people like Antonio said, because People hate change, much like when we had ETAs to RSAs, and we had DFA come along, so change, change is what we’re all about.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, this could be a good thing if you do it right, so you learn how to do it right. Brooke, welcome back to the show.

Brooke Osmundson: Yes, thank you. So like Fred said, I’ve been on once before but right now I currently serve as the leader of digital marketing for a company called Smith Micro Software. So what we do is we’re a technology company.

We work directly with wireless carriers and do marketing to the consumers of those products. So I bring the unique perspective from A, B to B to C. Previously before that I was agency side for almost five years and. When we started experimenting with performance max again, a lot of our clients were in the B to B realm.

So when Google was pushing that type of campaign campaign type on us, we were kind of met with some some challenges. And so I can bring some of The maybe lesser known B2B stories to today’s front outside of what everybody else has for e commerce.

Frederick Vallaeys: Great. Can’t wait to hear that angle, Brooke. And you kind of teed us up there for the first point of discussion, I suppose, which is you started experimenting with performance max campaigns, right?

So from all of you, like, what has that transition been? Like what, what, what has experimentation looked like and what has been sort of the initial Level of success or lack of their off that you’ve seen on brick. Let’s go right back to you on that one.

Brooke Osmundson: Oh, gosh. Okay. So So yeah, from a B to B perspective, we we worked with clients anywhere from like a very small to enterprise level B to B.

So we could not test them on all of our accounts, mainly because of limited conversion data. So I would say challenge number one is if you are not used to getting a ton of conversions You, you can expect some volatility.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, give some numbers there.

Brooke Osmundson: Oh my gosh. Well,

Frederick Vallaeys: and personal experience, I mean, we’re not looking for the absolute truth, right?

But what kind of numbers are you talking about?

Brooke Osmundson: You mean in China in terms of like conversions or, and

Frederick Vallaeys: conversions.

Brooke Osmundson: So basically what we found is if you had anything less than like a hundred conversions a month, you could expect some volatility. It just didn’t have enough data. Even though Google is a data machine, it’s going to take longer.

So we’re seeing volatility and especially during COVID times, everybody’s wanting results right away. So that was one of our major challenges. The other piece is sometimes, especially in an agency setting, when you’re not necessarily in control of make conversion tracking. So if, if your conversions are not set up the right way, or you’re measuring maybe the ones that you don’t want to be.

That can, that can definitely cause some problems in terms of how the performance is going to be, because it’s going to be as good as the inputs that you give it. So that was another challenge for us.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And those are definitely things we need to talk about as well as how do you report actually what you actually want to Google in terms of conversions.

Right. So we’ll, we’ll move back to that. Antonio, let’s, let’s hear from you next. What’s been that initial experience and have you just gone all in on Performance Max or have you done this through an experimental approach? Max

Antonia Vasile: what has been managed to obtain at monthly level ever since it has been started, this campaign, it’s something like, and I have made some notes here for, for an example Today we started with a conversion rate at 2.

05 and we went up to 4 percent and we started with a low loss in term of 8, 900 and currently we are going on nearly 220 which is 2000%. It’s absurd. I know that’s what’s happening. I’m very glad about it.

Frederick Vallaeys: And so what’s happened with the volume? So your conversion rate almost doubled? Yeah,

Antonia Vasile: I saw an increase in the volume in terms of searches and also an increase, a double in the conversion rate.

So conversion rates doubled and also a double in more than a double almost. More than double in the Ross obtained for the product. So it went above our KPI, whatever was asked from us. Then with another client I had to make a switch between his normal campaigns. He was doing shopping and search and we turned off those and moved on to performance max building two different set of assets inside because he’s doing adult let’s say sex toys and integrators and food integrators, you know, the supplements.

And with that one, we managed with the performance max, we managed to push a 1. 15 Ross, which is not that much satisfactory. This is a small company in Italy. So, this might even answer you to the how well the campaign is performing in Italy against Denmark, just to make an example. So it depends mostly on what country do you apply them, what type of niche do you apply them to, because in the adult area things doesn’t perform so good as they do in the hard goods.

Frederick Vallaeys: Interesting. So it sounds like you’re a fan. And you were mentioning high quality Danish furniture. So let’s go to Andrew because he’s a high quality Danish person.

Andrew Lolk: What have you experienced? It’s funny. It’s funny hearing this because we run furniture like aggressively for many retailers across all Europe, obviously with Denmark being a key market.

So if there’s a space, I know, then it, then, then it’s then it’s that, but performance max. So with. We’ve, we’ve, we’ve been testing it. We got a little bit late to the game, so we didn’t start really testing until January, but I’ve been testing since then. We did not feel like testing up to Q4. We, we liked the approach of letting other people test and then we’ll, we’ll hear a little bit, okay, what are some of the best practices that are happening that are not just coming from Google and as one of the things I know we’ll, we’ll talk about today, like the best practice when you look in the support center, it’s just launching it with all the assets and everything.

And that might not be the best idea. But the way we’ve tested is basically just replacing smart shopping. So we’ve had smart shopping some places and some clients have been very interested in doing it. We just replace it. We go straight to the performance max on the cases where we allow us to have that, that sort of risk.

And then we’ve tried to see what happens. And overall performance has been okay. I’m not, I’m not really excited about the, the mixing ad inventories in there. I’m really not a fan of. of losing that ability from an agency point of view. It’s completely different for in house but I don’t like losing that ability to, to know how much is going to each individual channel.

What are we spending in different places? How much does it actually take away from existing search campaigns? A lot of what we do is, is chasing that last 10, 20 percent scale and not having that ability to push it is something we’ve, we’ve struggled with a lot. With not having an insight, not having that ability to do it, but our initial results have been very similar to smart shopping.

Does well, does fine, when it does fine, when it does well hits the targets overall positive results. Hard to actually push a lot further. That’s maybe been our biggest challenge, just saying, okay, What happens once you’ve hit a certain level of ROAS and now you want to expand into more budget and get it to increase and increase without tapping into just focusing on other ad inventory like display or YouTube or or, or even just regular text, that’s really worried about that part.

So that’s where, where we’ve seen that we’ve taken the part inside internally and said, okay. Performance max is not the next smart shopping performance max is performance max. It’s something completely different than what we’ve had so far. It should be treated as such. It’s not something where you just, okay, let’s use a smart shopping because then we get a good baseline.

If you do that with, with performance max, it’s a different type of campaign. It hits different markets than smart shopping has. So so yeah, we’ve overall positive, but it’s not something we’re planning on using for a general wide use and savvy. Should be set. We’re only focused on Google ads, like search ads.

So this is all we do.

Frederick Vallaeys: Interesting. Dwayne, I want to hear from you then on your experience and whether you’ve experimented or just gone straight all in, but also start touching on the next topic, which is a little bit of structure, right? So do you then end up running performance max in conjunction with your other campaign types and the whole like channel distribution and.

Lack of clarity. How are you experiencing that? So let’s go into those topics a little bit too, if you can.

Duane Brown: Yeah, totally. I mean, like Andrew, we didn’t run anything in Q4. We used Q4 to kind of plan and think about like what we want to do. So we can watch things when we came back from basically our break, like we did the last week of December off.

And to Andrew’s point, I mean, we agree like performance max isn’t shopping. It’s not smart shopping, but I think at least from an execution standpoint, we think about like, if we were going to run performance max today, or if we’re going to run smart shopping, like, how would we do that? You know, if we’re going to have performance max replace smart shopping and smart shopping was going to be, let’s say a top skews in the account, then let’s try out our performance max with our top skews and see how that goes.

I think the one challenge we’ve seen, at least when people post to Reddit the last, you know, three, four months is. They don’t understand that always performance max will cannibalize what you’re doing in smart shopping at times. And people want to put like the same skew in Pmax and same skews in smart shopping.

I’d say, you know, our experience overall, it’s been lots of clients where performance has been good. There’s some clients where it’s been awful. There’s some clients in the middle where it’s not good, it’s not bad, but it’s not the best thing in the world. I think one thing we’ve tried, especially in January is watching with clients where there’s been.

a challenge to make shopping work in general because their product price point is higher than that of their average competitors. So we have a lot of clients in apparel. So they sell a more expensive sweatshirt, a more expensive X product, and everyone else sells it product at 50 percent cheaper and shopping has been hard for them.

So we say, let’s test out PMAX with this and see if we’ll do better. And it’s definitely, you know, Brought in sales. It’s above break even, but it’s not an amazer us where you want to like shoot from the rooftops or write a case study about it. But I think it’s also early days. I think back to when like DSA came out 10 years ago, everyone hated it.

And I think that’s what we see right now with PMAX. Everyone hates because it’s new and different. But I think there’s lots of opportunity down the road in terms of like structure. Kind of like I said, we look at like how we use smart shopping and think about that’s how we use PMAX at least to test it out because you have to start from somewhere, you know, just to do something randomly to do it doesn’t make, I think, tons of sense.

And then we’re mostly testing with the clients running campaigns in North America. We’ve not done tons in Europe yet, just because we want to figure out like what’s the baseline in North America and then figure out what we’ll do in like APAC or Europe and stuff like that. Interesting. And so then and at this point I want to just open it up to everyone.

Frederick Vallaeys: So I don’t want to call on people necessarily, but let’s have a conversation. Cause otherwise the whole hour will disappear before we know it. But so let’s talk a little bit more than about shopping, right? So do you see. Performance max as a thing you want to go to, or do you want to stay more on the traditional shopping campaign side?

Or do, do you think it’s a good replacement for smart shopping?

Duane Brown: I don’t know if it’s

Frederick Vallaeys: good.

Duane Brown: Do you wanna go, Andrew?

Andrew Lolk: You can go. You can start.

Duane Brown: Cool. Yeah, I mean, I don’t know if it’s a replacement for shop. I mean, that’s Google’s dream, right? I mean, their goal is to get us to spend as much money as possible, make as much money as possible so they can keep their fiduciary responsibility, their shareholders.

I think it’s a great campaign in the sense that like it makes their job easier. I think it’s a great campaign if you’re an agency that focuses more on strategy and you don’t want clients to pay you to like. Push buttons. I know lots of agencies love to push buttons. That’s what they sell. But at least for our agency, we’re all about strategy.

Pushing buttons is anything anyone can do. But I think it should complement, PMAX should complement everything else you do in an ad account, whether it’s across, you know, search, discovery, shopping, you know, I think the challenge for us, and I imagine the challenge for everyone is like, I think someone mentioned there’s no visibility.

So how much is PMAX cannibalizing brand? You know, how does that cannibalize? Cannibalization actually work, you know, Ginny on Twitter and the LinkedIn’s, you know, clarify that a few times, but each clarification feels a little bit different than the last. And so like, how does cannibalization actually work with the PMAX when you’ve got like, Well, to talk

Frederick Vallaeys: a little bit about that, right.

And Antonio, I want to have you weigh in too, but cannibalization, like what’s, what’s Google saying and what’s the actual, what’s actually happening?

Duane Brown: So the last I understood, and anyone can correct me if I’ve misunderstood what actually goes on here, but my understanding is that. Let’s say you’ve got like a brand campaign, right?

Let’s say your budget is 50 a day, but you could spend 100 a day. Since you’re not spending the total budget you could on the campaign, once you hit that 50 in a day, PMAX in theory would take over and start to take over the other 50 in what you could spend a day. But if you were spending the 100 a day, then in theory, PMAX would only cannibalize your phrase or broad match keywords in your brand campaign.

It wouldn’t cannibalize any of your exact match. That is my understanding. But of course you don’t have visibility in the campaign. And so you can’t like verify that what Google said is actually true. You just have to trust them. And I think we all agree, we don’t trust Google very much. And then there’s the whole

Frederick Vallaeys: side note, which is exact will Trump in your search campaign when eligible and it’s eligible.

So like the eligibility could be, you don’t meet the ad rank threshold. So now you’ve got the exact match keyword, but you’ve bid low, maybe, maybe on purpose, but that makes it ineligible. So now Google’s going to go in your P max campaign.

Andrew Lolk: That’s the whole point. So you have a keyword, like, like, listen to this.

So you have a keyword that you pause because it doesn’t perform well and performance Maxwell pick it up. It’s like, we’ve all like, we, like anybody who works in e commerce Love dynamic search ads. I love it to death. It’s the perfect campaign type to go and swoop on. There’s a fallback on your regular search, but I want to see what’s going on.

Like, I don’t like anybody who’s run a dynamic search ads campaign. No, you need to go in and check the search ads, the keywords that are appearing there sometimes. Like no matter what you do, you need to do something with it. And that’s, I don’t like this move where, where data gets taken away from advertisers.

I just think it’s just the wrong. Way to go about it because there’s so many smart things you can actually do with that data and you can help the system You can make sure you spend more money But we just get data taken away like dynamic search has becomes part of performance max and I like the idea I just don’t like the execution of it.

Frederick Vallaeys: It’s not great

Antonia Vasile: To give up on them,

Frederick Vallaeys: okay, so Antonio, how do you not have to give up? You

Antonia Vasile: don’t have to give up on your dynamic search ads By no mean you can only use the shopping area of your performance max. You’re not you don’t have to necessarily make text as video ads and all the other sections of a performance max in order to, to make it work.

That’s where I, I don’t understand why, why this, this thing happens because for an example, I have a client where I moved only the shopping in the social shopping section of the performance max without opening the other camp, the other sections like Text ads and obviously display ads and so, so this is something that I don’t know.

Maybe you want to put all together inside and obviously a full complete set campaign. It’s obviously something that gives you no information, but you can split it.

Frederick Vallaeys: The misunderstanding that I had in the beginning too, I mean, so from Google’s messaging, it’s like, here’s these like six or seven channels you’re basically going to go into, and then there’s also this thing called performance max for retail, which did kind of talk about, but not really but really performance max for retail.

Like that is the smart shopping campaign evolution. And so what’s interesting, what Antonio is saying is you can actually manipulate your channels and not by like toggling channels on and off, but by selectively assets or attributes. I mean, you could do that, but

Antonia Vasile: you can migrate your shopping to inside the smart in a performance max, you migrate your shopping only, you do not put text ads, you do not put video display, you don’t put the other elements in.

You don’t have

Andrew Lolk: to, you delete the URL as well. Like they don’t just add, you, delete the URL that’s in the asset section. That’s a very important point there. But yeah, you can’t make a function like, like, like a smart shop and can, but if, if like the whole gist of, of performance max, any guideline from Google says the most important thing is yeah, hold everything, add as many assets in there.

There is the go to old fashioned ad strengths that everybody misunderstands for like what it actually means. And it’s, it’s, it’s just, I haven’t, I haven’t, yeah.

Brooke Osmundson: And I, I’d like, Go ahead. No, you go ahead. Cause I was about to kind of switch from a B2B perspective, but I want you to finish your, your thought from, from the e comm.

Antonia Vasile: So there is something that I tried with a client and this was a very interesting from the point of view of control, because you Andrew says something. It’s like giving up control on our dynamic search ads, which are very important when you’re doing e commerce from the retailer point of view. So I tried to have this.

Client having more than one single performance max campaign. One, I dedicated it like it was a shopping campaign, shopping smart with a different name. This is how I tried to see it. And I didn’t completed the setup with all the elements. And that was like having the same old shopping campaign. And then I made another performance max, making it inside only the text area, no display, no video, because you can do that too.

Making more assets with the text ads, because obviously there is the problem with the no pinning. No, no, no, that it’s, it’s stupid anyway. And then I left out also active a dynamic search campaign. What was funny was the thing that that dynamic search ads continued to run without being cannibalized.

And I was like, whoa, it’s working. Then I asked my, my Google person. And then he told me, in fact, you can have how many dynamic search ads outside you want to have. I was like, what? That’s a little bit strange, but it’s true. It works.

Duane Brown: Interesting. I mean, you could do that, but I think we’ve seen at least when we run speed max with a shopping campaign with no assets, it does worse than when we add a shopping campaigns with assets in at least in North America.

But that’s just our experience. Obviously everyone’s got different experiences in different countries. Right. Just got tested, right?

Frederick Vallaeys: But Brooke, yeah, I’d love to hear from you. And maybe not so much on the e com side, but B2B.

Brooke Osmundson: Yeah. So when, when we’re running, you know, more service based ads, when we don’t have products we have definitely seen the cannibalization because we are relying a lot on search and display and YouTube.

And so the, the prop, I shouldn’t say the challenge. I’m going to use the word challenge. Cause we can, we can work through those, but what we were seeing is cannibalization in both brands and some non brand campaigns. Now we can’t prove that because. We’re still, you know, we did see an improvement in the volume of leads and, you know, performance max was, was driving a lot of them, but then to explain to clients when they’re asking, why is our brand down?

Well, we don’t have the transparency to actually tell them if that’s happening because of this new campaign type. So we see cannibalization that way. It is a lot different than e commerce because you know, your revenue numbers don’t lie. If you’re seeing that increase in ROAS and profitability, like you have a better leg to stand on to be like, okay, like whether it’s supplementing or replacing, this is great.

From a services or B2B standpoint. We have a lot more things that come into effect where, okay, your leads might be up, but now you’ve got the sales team questioning the lead quality. We started getting a lot of that at first. So from, from that cannibalization, we’re seeing it happen. And it’s just kind of hard to manipulate when, when you’re in a more traditional industry.

Addition to that, we had, I say had, cause I’m not at the agency anymore, but a lot of regulated clients where they still have to get their ad copy approved and some of them were not even allowed to advertise on YouTube. That’s a whole different story in terms of their company strategy. So I won’t get into that, but you know, how do you B2B companies, and if you’re an agency who specializes in that, how do you stay up to date with what Google wants you to do, and it’s sometimes forced migrating.

these campaign types when you’ve got a lot of other issues you’ve got to work through.

Frederick Vallaeys: So as someone who basically gets paid to manage digital marketing, what I’m hearing from several people here is it’s challenging when you drive great results, but there are questions that you can’t answer because Google doesn’t give you the metrics, they don’t give you the breakdowns, they don’t give you the reports that we need. But then I’m also hearing there’s a shift, right? So these campaigns do sometimes perform great. There’s some minimal management we do to them. But Brooke, you were talking about lead quality and you mentioned it very early in the session today. But like, what do you tell Google is your goal? Is that a strategy that you’re shifting towards optimizing?

And is that more of the value that we bring today? Or like, how do all of us continue to make money as PPC experts and consultants,

Brooke Osmundson: So that’s a great question because I would say in our favor as, as when I was working in the agency, it has kind of helped force the shifting and strategy. So I’ll just go with a very traditional example with you know, they had one to two conversions on their site.

It was either free trial or get a demo. You know, you see those everywhere. It does not matter what industry you’re in. And depending on the size of that industry, those could be few and far between you could maybe get 10 a month. You could maybe get a hundred a month, anywhere. So if you are optimizing for those, it’s going going to be very difficult.

So if we’re saying, okay, well, that’s kind of bottom of the funnel. We’re just constantly chasing squeeze. I think it was Antonio or I’m sorry, whoever said it, but like you’re squeezing out like that last 10 to 20%. Well then what happens to the rest of your funnel? So we’ve had to work with our clients to say, well, Are there any other, you know, whether it’s softer conversion opportunity points, you know, to, to measure against, like if it’s an email signup or, or something else that kind of gets them in the funnel.

So we did that with a client. It kind of opened up the floodgates because we were in that position where we needed more conversion points. We needed more data points for Google to learn. So that’s where. The lead quality kind of comes into question when you’re changing, how are you, how are you optimizing or what are you optimizing towards?

Frederick Vallaeys: Anyone else thought some like budget? So as you’ve kind of like tested these performance max campaigns and seen some success What’s like that next stage? Do you start breaking it out into multiple performance max campaigns with different targets? How do you spend more money in it? Have you even considered turning off some of the the legacy campaign types and put more on performance max?

I

Duane Brown: mean, we’ve done a little bit we’ve turned off some and maybe our better performing clients where they’re I’ll say it’s easier to get a sale because of the product they sell, and so we’ll turn off Smart Shop and replace with Performance Max. If we were spending, let’s say, 300 a day on Smart Shop and we’ll put 300 a day in Performance Max and see what happens.

Other than what Antonio said, I mean, you just kind of have to hope that you’re maxing revenue as much as you can. I mean, there’s always so much control. Obviously the Google gives you but if we’re not replacing, start shopping, we’ll put like 5, 000 a day on us PMAX campaign for testing that for something brand new and just see how it goes.

The lack of visibility is obviously challenging at times.

Andrew Lolk: Yeah. So I, I think the context here, whenever we speak about these things is so important because I off, I obviously sit in, in the hybrid optimization space, like, like, like really just like. Google ads, as opposed to Dwayne, who does more channels and where, where strategy then is, is the key point when we get involved as advertisers who is just looking to maximize everything they can do about Google ads.

So I, I, I like to have the, the contrast there that, that, that’s where, where we’re coming from. When we’re talking about like in house teams or, or agencies like Dwayne’s then I think performance max is, you need to look at it as, you know, What as what is it? It is like it’s not a, you shouldn’t try to create all these workarounds and use it as it is like, like, I’ve always said in the past when I’ve got asked like the good old Google shopping strategy, the query split, well, should I do that?

Should I not do that? Well, are you going to use it? Are you going to do something about it? Are you going to constantly find the search terms? Yes or no. If you’re not, yeah. Then just max smart bidding on it and let it work or jump into smart shopping. I think same thing with performance max. If you are going to spend the time and have to have the experience to use some of the features that are available today, like seasonality adjustments, minimum, maximum bids, and tweaking target rows, building multiple campaigns and using priorities, then that’s a really good use of your time.

If you can get that last 10, 20, 30 percent performance. And it’s worth it. But for an in house team, I just think it’s like trying to chase that is, it’s not worth it. So that’s really where leaning into performance max as much as possible. And just if we go with a question like the budget, keep increasing the budget until it stops performing.

And then, then. Then performance max management really becomes into that, that game of, okay, how can we set the best target ROAS and see what revenue comes out of it in the end. And I think creating multiple campaigns for that purpose is, is really, really nice. I would love for performance max to get the opportunity to target different ROAS levels for different categories, because I think Google would be Would just be allow people to be a lot more aggressive with, with that.

You see it across all retailers. They have different ROAS targets for different products and brands. And it would just be so nice to be able to, to do that in performance max until then break it up into different campaigns.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, exactly. Because right now they one thing that’s new is multiple asset groups.

So in a smart shopping campaign, it was basically if you want a different TROAS with ROAS targets, you have to have multiple smart shopping campaigns, but it’s, and I may be wrong here, but it seems like in performance max, you can have different asset groups with different groupings of products and different targets.

Is that something that you’re using

Andrew Lolk: or am I wrong on that one? I haven’t seen the targets on the asset group level. I don’t know if I’ve missed it.

Frederick Vallaeys: I might be wrong on the targets, but so you do have asset groups, right? And you have listing groups as well.

Antonia Vasile: You can have up to 100 asset groups per performance max.

Andrew Lolk: So how You cannot set targets per asset group, can you?

Antonia Vasile: I don’t know about targets, you know, you gave me a good question to ask and I’m I promise you I’m going to shut this question to my advisor inside Google to know if he knows something about it. That would be interesting.

Andrew Lolk: No, but I would have seen it like that.

That would that would be something I would be very exciting. I’m excited. I’ve seen it.

Antonia Vasile: I never saw it before. It’s mostly like we’re looking for a different roast management at different product group at level, which was not possible. So I don’t know if it’s reacting the same way in terms of assets.

So I suppose in that case, you could have different prices.

Frederick Vallaeys: Alright, so in that case, then you just make multiple performance max campaigns. And you can split out your product lists between them. And then within that, you can have different asset groups. But Brooke, have you, maybe used different asset groups and have a strategy around that?

Brooke Osmundson: Well, I literally just had a strategy come to me as Andrew was talking. So thank you. Because one, what I was going to say is like, well, let me answer your first question, Fred. So at the very beginning, when we started testing probably Q4 of 2021 we were just testing very basic. We didn’t have different asset groups that we were testing.

So we were just kind of doing. You know, setting up one, see how it goes. But the other point that I was trying to get to earlier was, you know, when we’re seeing that cannibalization, but you’re not sure if it’s coming from brand or non brand, we did end up turning off some of the non brand campaigns that just tanked in performance.

You know, we’re talking CPAs going from like 50 a lead all the way up to like 600. So we’re like, all right, turn those off. But. Our problem is like, you know, if we were just using one performance max campaign and we had a target CPA, you know, that doesn’t give us enough chance to kind of like warm up to who we’re trying to sell to, you know, very different from e commerce where you have the products.

So Andrew, you gave me a really good thought in terms of if you set up different performance max campaigns with different targets of CPA, just because that’s, we’re going after, we don’t have target ROAS. You could almost kind of. Theorize it as like, okay, I’m going to do a CPA of like our top, which would be like 250, for example, maybe I might use some softer messaging with that with different conversion points to, to do more of an awareness.

And then I’m going to do like a mid funnel with a CPA of 125. And then, you know, Different messaging there. And then a third for performance max campaign that would be considered like our aggressive one where, you know, that’s when we’re doing our free trials, our demos, whatever that core conversion is.

So I definitely want to test that have not though, but thank you for. So it’s an

Andrew Lolk: interesting, I think it sounds really interesting to try that and see if you can, because that that’s really what I think that a lot of people should think about performance max about like, like, like, so, so me, like, I don’t know how many of you, but, but I’ve been in this industry for 12 years and the way we’ve, we’ve done things for the last 12 years has really changed.

And I think that, that, that, that trying to figure out how to replicate what we used to do. In this new performance max world. If you use performance max, it’s just, it’s not going to work. You have to do things like Brooke, like thinking that way through or thinking that way about our old, like a single keyword ad group setups would have been like, it’s just that you would never have done something like that.

So I think that kind of thinking is what you want when you, and then say, okay, lean into the performance max world. If you’re going in that direction, don’t try to have a little bit and a little bit, like, It is a data world, the more data you give the systems and you also, you’ve, you’ve seen that very early on with Facebook ads, where the setups that we used to have used to be very, very, very specific, it’s like, okay, the entire world into one campaign and let it rip.

Granted, I guess 14 kind of screwed some things up, but the same thing here. Lean into the campaign time, give it as much data as possible and maybe give it, like, try to think of optimizations as something different. Like, like Brooke just mentioned. I thought that was a key point. And I will say, I am very happy that we can give audience signals.

Brooke Osmundson: You know, with Smart Shopping when I used to run those, it was like, Here you go. Just just give it the feed. And I was like, why is this? Like, I would be mad when it would actually work against standard shopping because like, I didn’t know what I would like. Tell me why. But at least with performance max, you do have a little bit more of that control where you can give different audience signals, which could also support why you would want to set up different.

Performance Max campaigns.

Andrew Lolk: I just want to hit on the word control because I know we as marketers, we say it all the time but I think we use the wrong word. It’s insights. Because like, I’m not craving like Dwayne said in the beginning, I’m not craving trying to go back and click on buttons and negative keywords and all that stuff.

With smart bidding, it’s gotten really really smart. So I think I think the control is not what many of us are leaning or wanting to. We just want the insights so we can help the system more. If we know that the outdoor messaging or whatever works better, then let’s, let’s take that insight and use it on the websites.

Let’s use it in the creatives that we’re using. The more insights we can share. From Google to us and distill it and send it to the clients. That could be the new world of consultants, but the more data that gets taken away is like, I just, it’s not a control thing. It’s more like,

Brooke Osmundson: it’s harder to explain exactly.

That’s my biggest thing is like, how do I take this? What’s happening and explain it. If I can’t, if I don’t even know what’s going on. So you’re right. Control is not the best word to use.

Duane Brown: I think that’s one thing I like about PMAX. You do have like the asset reports. Google will tell you like what’s good and what’s bad.

It’s not the best thing, but I think that is one way to glean insights of like, okay, these types of ad creator, these types of ad copy are working. Let’s test it on email or test it on the site. You know, to your point, Andrew, I think that day is already here. The day of like, take more insights to clients has been here for the last few years.

I think as an industry, kind of like you said, this, this is a chasmic mind shift of performance max. It’s not like when we got ETA. Or DSA. This is like, basically we’re all starting from scratch and we’re all back. I’ve been here 16 years. So it’s like 16 years ago when I started in 07. I don’t know what I don’t know.

And I’m going to try to like consume as much content, like even on Google’s support doc for PMAX. There’s like, here’s our general creative practices. Here’s our retail best practices. There’s our B2B, you know, press practices for PMAX. They’re all very different. And I think at this point people just need to like do more research because a lot of people ask questions on Reddit and it’s clear they’ve not done any research.

They’re just like, tell me everything I need to know and I’m like, I don’t think it’s going to work that way because this is brand new territory for everyone.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly. So listen to this call, but then go and do your research afterwards too. As you can tell, we’re learning here too from from each other.

I think those asset optimizations are really interesting. Talk a little bit more about maybe some examples of what you’ve done or what kind of Insights you get, and does that get combined with audience insights? Because Brooke was talking about while we were, or Andrew was talking about, we want to take the outdoor messaging, put that on the website.

Like at what level do the assets tell you something useful that could be strategic?

And that’s for you, Dwayne. Oh, okay, it was for me, sorry. I said Andrew, but I wasn’t sure if it was Andrew, sorry. That was just his example, but I wanted I get your opinion, but Dwayne, why don’t you go first?

Duane Brown: Yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s not necessarily an insight yet. It’s just more of a direction we can lean into.

If we know, we have a client that sells kids toys. We’ve had them for, like, almost four years. If we’ve got four types of images, or five types of images, and five pieces of ad copy, we see something working, we’ll say, hey, why don’t we test this in email? Why don’t we test this? On search ads or test this on a Facebook, right?

And see, you know, does these pieces, combinations of creative and ad copy and images work on, you know, Facebook or if we’re doing something on Discovery. And if we see it work across lots of channels, I think then it starts to be an insight of let’s move in that direction. And how we talk about the business, how we talk about the product.

Like if a client that sells a woman’s pajamas, you know, one thing we try to lean on. Really hard during the pandemic is the idea that like people are working from home. So it’s pajamas for more than just the bedrooms, pajamas you wear pretty much when you wake up until you go back to bed, because you’re working from home.

Why put on like work clothes? If no one’s going to see me below this, I’ve got sweats on right now, but unless I told you that you wouldn’t know I have sweats on. So I don’t think it’s an insight yet. It’s more of a, here’s something we should look into and see if we can replicate across other channels.

And then it maybe becomes an insight of something we can like use across the rest of the business. I think the other thing Google says a lot of, and We have to test it more. The idea if you have a piece of image or ad copy that has a poor signal, you know, to remove that, but then replace with something, right?

They don’t want you just to remove that poor ad copy of their poor image. And so we want to test that more to see, like, what does that do? What does that not do? And then obviously don’t compare a poor image to a poor piece of ad copy. Those are two, Different pieces of creative that you need to think about.

So

Frederick Vallaeys: there’s basically a whole new framework for testing that you need.

Duane Brown: Yeah. You know, I think there is, I mean, the ASTHO report isn’t bad. I mean, at least it says, here’s your best images. Here’s your best, you know, copy in theory. And then you’re, it’s your goal to figure out like, why is this working? Why is this not working?

And how do I replicate more of that? It’s very, I think to Andrew’s point, it’s very Facebook in a lot of ways. Like what’s working on Facebook, why is it working? How do I just do more of that, you know, which for some people is really hard. They’re not they’re not the analytical thinking. I think in some people are industries.

That’s not a skill that all agencies try to get their teams to develop. It’s usually just like push buttons, but PMAX is not really a push button kind of, kind of piece of software campaign.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. I mean, that that’s interesting because I feel like Google wants it to be a push button sort of campaign, but I like what you were saying, right? So. I think for the novice user, PMAX is great because it is a push button. You put in your goals, you just let it run and let it do its thing. But then for us, there are actually ways to still optimize it, which, which I love.

So I’d like to get final points from each of you. I’d also love to hear if there’s like an optimization tip that you’ve deployed that you thought was really cool. So anything along those lines or anything that we haven’t talked about that that you want to share in these final few minutes.

Andrew Lolk: So if I can get, I can start because if, if we take two things, we’d start with the optimization tip.

I think one of the key things that, that everybody should, should still do and that, that you should always have been doing is, is working on what are the product segments that you’re actually, that you’re actually pushing. Because what we’ve seen with, with, with smart shopping and performance max for that sake is that, that products that don’t perform like over a certain price level or.

From a specific brand or anything else where you just like, there’s a segment of products that don’t perform. They still get X amount of clicks for a very long time, especially if you increase the budget for a smart shopping performance max campaign. So it will still get, get a lot of exposure. So really working on your product segmentation in terms of, okay, what should, what should be running?

What should not be running? It’s, it’s a key tip that we’ve seen work really, really, really well to, to just give the campaigns more, more ROAs to work with and expand into. I think my, my, my last thing is just like really like we’ve talked about so far is just lean into it. Like in, in savvy, we’re not leaning into performance max.

We, we have, we have other strategies that we use that we’ve used for a long time. We didn’t lean into smart shopping either. But that doesn’t mean that in house teams or agencies that are more like, like broader focused shouldn’t, I think it’s an amazing campaign type, but then lean into it. Don’t try to do both at the same time and get upset over the cannibalization and other things we talked about today.

Lean into it, use the tool. It’s like trying to like when, again, if we learned from Facebook, if you were trying to do it the old fashioned way with Facebook. It just didn’t work. Can’t do both at the same time. Adding more and more data into the system will make it perform better and better and better. So, so if you are using it, if you are using performance max, don’t try to like do the things that you used to do.

Lean into the system, lean into the way that it’s it’s using and, and go all in that, that works better than, than trying to do a little bit. When you

Frederick Vallaeys: say lean in, then you mean sort of like focus on the outcomes as opposed to the details. Yeah, like,

Andrew Lolk: like, like, like for me, if, if, if like, like Brooke also, as I mentioned earlier, if you, if there’s a, so we’re paid to be experts, we’re paid to have answers or could come to be able to come up with answers.

If we get, if we get asked from a large retailer, how much are we spending on remarketing our brand versus non brand? And we don’t have that answer. And it’s a core strategy of theirs to, to not spend as much on brand. Then we can’t use something like performance max at this point in time to answer those questions.

But if you’re sitting as an in house team and you have like, we, we did the cases that we’re have like coaching with, they do a thousand other things. They would have half a day a week. If they’re lucky to work on Google ads, nobody asks these questions. How much are we spending on brand versus non brand existing versus the new customers.

And nobody cares. It’s just, it just. If we get a million a month or a year or whatever, we’re really happy at this for us, great, that’s all we need to know if those cases, then don’t even try to like overdo the optimization part which which is what was frustrating. A lot of people like me is we don’t get that ability.

But that shouldn’t frustrate somebody who doesn’t need it or not going to do anything with that data or information like that. You can do both things that you don’t have to, like, both things can be right. That’s what I’m trying to say.

Frederick Vallaeys: Do something with the data you get. And we, we have these amazing stats with an Optmyzr about the massive, massive number of reports that we send out automatically every month because people ask for them.

And then we know how many of those reports can open. And it’s like, you’re not doing anything because you’re not looking at it. But sometimes you just want those insights to be there for when the questions arise. So that all makes sense. All right. Who wants to volunteer next year? I

Brooke Osmundson: can fight. Nope. You go ahead.

All right.

Frederick Vallaeys: Can

Brooke Osmundson: you tell I’m a middle child because I’m like, Oh no, you, you go ahead. So I have always said like, the more I’ve been in this industry, I’ve been in it for 10 years, like. Your success of your campaigns will be in the settings. So that’s something that should not be overlooked. And something I said earlier is these, your campaign success will only be as good as what you put into it.

And so, you know, always taking your time and understanding why you’re putting in the inputs that you’re, that you’re doing, not even if it’s just your target ROAS or CPA. Looking at your, your different conversions. Does this make sense for what I, for, for this goal? And that could also go farther with your assets too.

You know, something I was thinking about to your question, Fred was like, you know, the asset reporting. We would get a lot of just saying like, they’re good. They’re poor. A lot of them still learning. But then when I, when you take a step back and you look at them, I’m like, Oh. We have a lot of the same kind of aesthetic, or we’re kind of saying the same things just in a slightly different way.

Like, I would say, don’t be afraid to be a lot more bolder in terms of what you’re testing for assets. And if you’re in an agency setting, yes, that’s going to be a lot tougher. But, you know, ask those questions with your marketing team. You know, do something completely different than you haven’t done before.

Because if you’re just, you know, if you’re only slightly changing things, you’re not really moving the needle. So to kind of sum up like success in the settings, like understand what you’re doing and why that would be my biggest tip.

Frederick Vallaeys: And I love the whole be bold angle. I think with machine learning nowadays, and somebody was mentioning it before, right, but we have the ad strength indicator for RSAs.

And it, it’s, it’s really horrible because it is basically a best practice machine learning model that’s built off of all of history. And so it basically rewards people for being mediocre. And doing more mediocre things, but someone who’s going to be bold and try something new, while the machine is going to guess that that’s probably not what it wants you to do.

So it wants you to stay inside the box, right? But you can’t break out of the box if you’re just listening to the machine models. And that’s where we as humans have to be. Risk takers, but, but reasonable risk takers. We know our companies, we know the messaging, we know how to be bold, but still be on message.

And so I really like that point of yours. All right, Antonia. So as a closing word aside from the segmentation Andrew spoke about because I’m absolutely the segmentation person too. So I’m always advising for segmentation run for your zombies, find the zombies. Products and push them into the plain view, make them sell, don’t let them at the bottom as many are used to have all the products in one huge campaign, no matter how many SKUs they are managing instead of having them split and segmented by All the needed criteria.

Antonia Vasile: What I think is this performance max at the end of the day with all the changes that it’s bringing in will allow us some time to do something that most of the times when boarding new clients, I’m seeing not done, namely the most stupid thing of the e commerce, which is Optimize your feed for the best keywords.

Maybe this is the right time to do it because I’m finding feeds in a terrible state and no keywords put to work like that. And maybe this will help also understanding what keywords to be used in the text ads that we are making in the In the performance max campaigns that we are creating to accompany our.

Shopping ads is most of the time we are finding skews with a title, which is equal to the title of a product on the page, which is not good for the Google shopping and all of the cases I very, I see very little times when people consider what it is a short title, which is the new attribute. Yes, it’s optional, but it’s needed for discovery.

I wonder how many bothered to make that short title. I don’t know. I don’t think too many, but it’s something that in the performance max might have some sense if performance max obviously showing our products on all the on the surfaces. So maybe this performance max moment, it’s also a good moment to consider optimizing for real our feeds.

Frederick Vallaeys: I love that. And Hey, I’m the host of the show. So I’m going to do the shameless plug here, but Optmyzr is building a feed optimization tool specifically for PPC. So if anyone wants to get access to our beta, Andrew, you’re in drain.

Duane Brown: Our team already got an email. We didn’t

Andrew Lolk: get an email. Like we’re Denmark.

We’re supposed to get emails.

Frederick Vallaeys: So support at Optmyzr. com and we’ll put you in the beta. All right. Awesome points, Antonia. And that leaves us with Dwayne. Take us home, Dwayne.

Duane Brown: Sure. You know, I told him I’m going to say nine out of 10 shop and feeds we see are horrible. That’s why we all still have jobs.

So why would we not have everybody fix their up shopping feeds? But I think in terms of a tip. You know, the big one, I think, is just test out performance max. I think every brand should test out at least once and try it out. This idea that we should always be scared of change is, I think, really bad for our industry because we’ll miss out on opportunities.

And then beyond that, when you’re using, let’s say, you know, keyword targeting as an audience single, you know, make sure you check. You want to Google it off to people who search for those keywords on google. com versus people who have purchase intent or interest in those keywords. You know, I think that subset of a set in change is very much to when people, you know, do location targeting on a search campaign or shopping campaign and they pick people interested in their area and then they wonder why their keywords show for people outside of their target country.

So those are my two tips really is test it out, make sure you pick the right setting when you do your keyword targeting, you know, keyword target on PMAX and try it out, you know, the future is what you make it and we should try out new things from Google even if we think it’s going to be horrible.

The

Frederick Vallaeys: future

Duane Brown: is what?

Andrew Lolk: Yeah. Can I just add a, like a la like a last thing that I don’t think we touched enough upon in, in today, and that’s the, the idea of, of being able to, to run performance max without any assets whatsoever. So like we, we had it as a, as a, as a topic. And I think that, that if you are very concerned, like let’s say you’re really heavily main part of your business comes from smart shopping today, and you’re just Dr.

You just. Dreading the move to, to performance max clear, all clear, all assets, like clear all assets, the URLs, everything don’t add anything. Then you get as close to a SmartShark performance as possible. And then you can kind of control when you can then start adding assets to it yourself. It’s, it could be a good way, especially for a nice team to just.

not be as concerned with the move as possible, because I think there’s, there’s too much drama around it. I very much shit shit Dwayne’s thinking that, that not all new is, is bad. So. So I agree.

Frederick Vallaeys: Good. Hey, I love all the new best practices that are coming out here and we’re just at the beginning of performance max, so there’s much more to come.

Thank you for spending another hour with us. We do have a feedback form that’s in the comments. Please let us know if this session was helpful. If you’d like to see more of these, we’re happy to do them. Tell us which panelists you want to see come back and hear more about. And subscribe to the channel.

Lots more episodes in the works. Thanks for watching and have a great day. We’ll see you on the next one.