Performance Max for Retail and Ecommerce: Learn How to Drive Better Results

Episode Description

#PerformanceMax — the one campaign to rule them all — has seen widespread adoption among advertisers from various verticals.

But how should advertisers in #ecommerce and retail specifically approach this revolutionary campaign type?

That’s why for this episode, we brought in two specialists, Mike Ryan and Menachem Ani, who have years of experience under their belt in running successful campaigns for ecommerce and retail. They’re going to talk about how to approach Performance Max campaigns, how to structure them and share great tips.

Tune into this episode to learn:

- How to structure your campaign?

- What strategies to implement and when?

- How to make use of the channels besides shopping?

and more.

Our expert guests:

- Mike Ryan, Smarter Ecommerce

- Menachem Ani, JXT Group

Episode Takeaways

Here are the key takeaways from the discussed topics in the PPC Town Hall episode on Google’s Performance Max campaigns:

How to structure your campaign?

• Asset Groups: Use multiple asset groups per campaign for thematic consistency, focusing on specific product types or categories.
• Listing Groups: Employ listing groups to refine which products are displayed, using custom labels for segmentation by business criteria.

What strategies to implement and when?

• Early Adoption: Transition to Performance Max early, especially before peak seasons, to allow campaigns to optimize.
• Migration Tools: Use Google’s migration tools to retain historical data when moving from Smart Shopping, which helps reduce the learning period for new campaigns.

How to make use of the channels besides shopping?

• Leveraging Additional Channels: Utilize channels like YouTube, Gmail, and Display within Performance Max to expand reach.
• Audience and URL Exclusions: Use audience exclusions and URL blocking to refine targeting and improve ad relevance.

Additional Takeaways:

• Keyword and Audience Control: Manage potential search campaign cannibalization by Performance Max using negative keywords and audience exclusions.
• Future Developments: Anticipate new features like auction insights in Performance Max for deeper campaign performance analysis.

Episode Resources

Here’s the Performance Max campaign structure Mike was referring to in the discussion: https://smarter-ecommerce.com/blog/en…

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 you know, we like to talk about the hottest topics in PPC and unquestionably one of the things that’s most top of mind for people these days is Performance Max.

And we’ve had a couple of episodes about Performance Max before, but we figured there’s so many angles to this that we’re going to go a little bit deeper on the specific angle of Performance Max. For retail and e commerce and to help me with that, I’ve got two of the world’s smartest e commerce marketers, and Menachem Ani and Mike Ryan.

So welcome to this episode of PPC town hall.

All right. So here are my guests for today. Mike Ryan and welcome to the show guys. So let’s start with well, both of you are first timers on the show, right? So there’s no order here, but let’s start with Mike and tell people who you are and what you do and why, you know, so much.

MIKE RYAN: My name is Mike.

I’m working at a Smarter Ecommerce also known as smack Situated in beautiful Alpine nation of Austria. And yeah, we’ve basically got a lot of clients in retail, also brands, e commerce generally across Europe. So. We’ve been working with standard shopping for a long time and smart shopping as well, but I think performance max is there’s a different kind of an urgency or a momentum behind performance max.

This is it’s incorporating some new placements like search, and it’s just something that feels bigger and more forceful than. Some of the Google automation from the past. So it’s definitely a key focus of ours and because it’s a key focus of our clients, they want to understand this. And yeah, I mean, I’ve got a background in retail.

I’ve done everything from driving forklifts to working in purchasing and managing electronic catalogs. So it’s really my pleasure to work basically for retailers with topics like this one.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah. Welcome to the show. It’s great to have you on. I didn’t realize all that fork lift to driving experience.

Yeah. Yeah. Brick and mortar. I, I drive,

MIKE RYAN: I drive a few different kinds of forklift. Yeah.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Okay. I mean, I’ll have anything any forklift driving in my

MENACHEM ANI: past, but years ago I did help pack boxes and then we’re Spent some time in the warehouse getting the orders out when they needed help. So I definitely know the drill.

Like Mike, I’m excited to join you today. Again, my name is Menachem founder of JXT group. We’re based on the Jersey shore of the United States and we’ve been testing performance max probably since last September before it was even available for retail, but it’s definitely evolved a lot. As Mike mentioned, there is definitely a sense of urgency to get ahead of it because Google really is, is promoting it aggressively.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah, exactly. I’m promoting it aggressively. It’s not just that, right. It’s or when you say promoting, do you mean the automatic upgrade or they call it the promotion to to performance max? So basically to frame this, if you’re, do you do using smart shopping today, there is going to be a forced migration at some point, I believe around September.

When every campaign is going to have to become a performance max campaign is not shots. The standard shopping campaign will stay standard shopping, but smart shopping will become performance max either performance max or performance max for retail. So both of you and, and we’ll start with Menachem to talk a little bit about.

In that upgrading process. Have you migrated these campaigns? Are you waiting? So our

MENACHEM ANI: So our approach has been to, for the clients that are heavily reliant and campaigns are heavily reliant on smart shopping to wait for that tool to have become available now that it’s been available to use that tool. What we found is that it reduces the learning curve from a new performance max campaign.

And I’ve actually had conversation with product manager at Google who verified that when you use that tool, it It carries over the historical performance data and it does reduce the amount of time the system needs to really learn and understand. So I definitely do recommend using the one click tool, but just double check the new campaign that it creates and make sure that it’s set up and configured the way you want it to.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Exactly. So there’s no point to making a new performance max from scratch. You use the great tool. And then do you feel like right now is a good time or are there still benefits to Maybe sticking with traditional SmartShell until this. Yeah, and

MENACHEM ANI: in my experience, it’s always better to get ahead of it.

So this way you have time to work out any problems that you might encounter, especially considering, you know, we’re, we’re in July now, Q3 just started, Q4 is coming. Like you really want to make sure that your performance max campaigns are in a good place leading up to the holiday season. So my, my recommendation is get ahead of that.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Make sense?

MIKE RYAN: Yeah, likewise, I think now’s the right time to start testing and checking things out. And because of the way that the, these campaigns don’t really play nicely with each other, so testing is a little tricky. You can’t just kind of you have to be very careful that you don’t have overlap in the products because it can, it will really kill your smart shopping campaigns if you activate at the same time.

So you need to be delicate with that. And in terms of the migration tool. We also recommend using the migration tool. I think it’s a, it’s kind of a fascinating trade off where if you, if you use the migration tool, as said, there’s a faster learning time. The data is preserved on the back end, but it will remove, delete this, the smart shopping campaign that it’s replacing.

So this is something to be mindful of. Some people have been using a manual migration in order to like retain that that old campaign, the visibility on that. But it’s, it’s weird because then you face a more or less a cold start or a longer learning time. So if you’re using the tool this kind of issue is resolved as far as I understand it.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: And when you, when you say the migration tool removes the old smart shopping campaign, is it like no longer visible or is it just in the status of removed? We can still look around at the correctness. It

MENACHEM ANI: does. It does put it to the removed status. So you technically can pull it up, but I’m not sure if it’ll stay there forever.

What, what happens to those after a while?

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah, usually those remove things do stick around for a while. So you could still do the comparison here and there, but that’s interesting.

MIKE RYAN: Sorry just the other thing is that the campaign structure might not be one to one because it’s just going to create these because there’s only a single ad group.

It’s more shopping is going to create a single asset group, which you might, you might have to just double check here. You set up, sorry, what were you going to say Naki?

MENACHEM ANI: Yeah, no, and I found the same is you definitely want to check like your product groups and everything is configured the right way. But I, I think like one of the downsides of using the one click upgrade tool is that when it goes to remove, I don’t think you can reactivate that campaign.

If it’s for whatever reason, your performance max is not working the way you want it to, you can’t really fall back to it.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: But in our experience, I find that that’s too far. Yeah. Too far between. Yeah. So maybe the best practice here is go in and add Zeditor, download all the details of that and then you can more easily recreate it if But you won’t be able to load one.

MENACHEM ANI: Yeah, in general, I feel like the one click upgrade tool though is, is worth utilizing for those purposes because it really does work well and you get that performance boost with it.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Mike, you teed up some things here that have to do with structure, right? So you mentioned smart shopping has one ad group.

The product max for retail has multiple asset groups. By the way, does anyone kind of want to explain what’s an asset group versus what’s an ad group?

MIKE RYAN: I mean, the, the core thing about an, about an asset group is that as the name kind of suggests, it will have assets associated with also audience signals that you might provide or sign which is another difference from performance max compared to smart shopping is having this audience dimension kind of back in play or strong, more strongly in play.

And Yeah, with with the asset group,

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: you

MIKE RYAN: know, the theory is that you should have kind of a thematic quality to these. So it’s quite popular to see asset groups for, for example product types or brands or things like this that there’s a thematic link so that in the end there’s some kind of a thematic coherence to the to the creatives that get produced out of those assets automatically by performance max.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Right. And in the hierarchy of things, the asset group is really the equivalent of the ad group. It sort of sits below the campaign and it can have your targeting as well as your creative components in it. Yeah, but Mike, I know you have some slides you want to show. So maybe now’s a good time to pull that up.

But in terms of account structure, let’s talk about that a little bit, right? So given that you have multiple asset groups within each campaign, Would you set up multiple campaigns? Would you set up multiple asset groups? Would you run smart shopping? Sorry, would you run performance packs alongside traditional shopping campaigns?

So let’s start unpacking that a little bit. And Mike, why don’t you go first? So

MIKE RYAN: I mean, there’s, there’s some pretty interesting ideas out there about how to kind of mix and match these campaigns or create kind of these Frankenstein things or people who have ideas about how to serve performance max campaigns with You know, where you’ve got one campaign where the assets are turned off.

And so it functions a lot more like a classic product listing ad campaign or, or a bit like smart shopping. And another campaign where you’ve just Where you’ve only got the assets in there so that you kind of isolate these two things. I think these approaches are interesting, but for me I just feel like the, there’s already, the technology is quite new and there’s a certain amount of, of risk and transition in there anyway.

Also. We’re focused on getting things up and running is and as you mentioned for the holiday, the peak season that’s coming up ahead. And so right now I’m not really in such a hacking mindset there. I’m taking it more by the books approach and working with, with performance max as intended who are tackles all these placements and all this ad inventory.

So that’s kind of my take on it.

MENACHEM ANI: What about you? Yeah, so like Mike, I try not to make things too complicated. I try to use it as intended. I think for us, like, in terms of thinking about structure, it’s, you know, lining up the campaign structure with the client goals, but ultimately, the main reasons why you would want to use a different campaign versus a different asset group is.

For budgeting reasons or reporting reasons, while the asset group is very much like an ad group, there is no reporting at that level. And so if you really wanted to see the breakdown of how a certain asset group was doing, maybe a product category or a specific line of products you have. In that case, you might want to split it into a separate campaign so that you can see the full performance of each one.

Now technically you could see performance on the listing group level, which is And so asset groups are like the ad group, a listing group is I guess the new name for product groups, but it will only show you ad spend connected to ads that utilize data from your data feed. It won’t show you ad spend or performance for ads that were created with whatever assets you added at the asset group level, which could be images, videos, text.

And things of that nature. So in those cases, you might want to split them into another campaign, but at the same time, you don’t want to create too many campaigns because the system can work better with, with more budget in a single campaign.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Right. Now that’s where we get into portfolios then, right? So the more stuff you put into a portfolio, the more one thing can sub a good thing, right?

Subsidize a bad thing. And you can grow revenue, but, but let’s talk about those listing groups for a second, right? So how do you think about those listing groups? Do you take an approach of, Just put all products in the single listing group, or do you actually split it out by brand, by category? Yeah. So in my experience,

MENACHEM ANI: the approach we take is that it does depend on the retailer.

You know, if it’s a, if it’s a low skew volume store with maybe, you know, five or 10 products, we’ll likely put it more into one or two, one or two. The one campaign with one or two asset groups, if it’s a larger store with, you know, hundreds of products or thousands of products, that’s when we’ll start to split it out a bit more to be more thematic and have more control over, you know, what products are, are taking up the bulk of the, of the spend.

MIKE RYAN: Yeah, I mean, I can share this image now and for audio listeners, I can walk through that as well, but I mean, I hear I’ve just got to kind of a schematic from like a, sort of a non practice, which is basically one campaign and one asset group associated with it. So that’s like. A very simple way of pursuing this, but it’s extremely generic.

And then a more common practice that we’re seeing is that people will have you know, a campaign for product types or, or for You know, attributes like a brand but what we’re, what we’re

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: doing on screen. So, so just to kind of illustrate this, right, but say you sell cookware. So one campaign would be for induction cookware.

The other one you have here for cast iron, different type of cookware. And you had a third one for baking. Yeah,

MIKE RYAN: exactly. And you know, I think it, it depends again on the kind of volume that makes sense for you and what assets you have to support this. If they are thematically different enough these are all questions that come into play about really how granular you want to split that out.

Because so much.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Right. And then just to pause on that too for a second. So when you say like, how differentiated are your assets? So obviously Google wants you to put in some images, but there’s also a text component. So between cast iron and induction cookware, I mean, you should be able to come up with 5 different headlines that kind of talk about induction versus cast iron, even if your imagery is kind of like a generic set of pans or cookware.

But it’s still the fax is going to be more relevant to what the person is. Yeah, definitely. I mean, you

MIKE RYAN: know, within induction, it could be that you can have some more messaging, more for families where it’s really attractive that you know, an induction stovetop or cookware that it doesn’t get so hot as traditional cooktop stovetops or traditional cookware and stuff like that.

So there could be some differences here, for example. And then what, what we recommend First off, we recommend that you don’t just run in headlong and create a hyper segmented campaign, but really take your time building this thing out. And it’s also, you know, if you don’t have the assets in place this is something that you can’t force and it’s probably not a great idea to put in.

Junk assets or something like this. You don’t want to force that. But what we recommend in the end is to have several campaigns and to try to reflect some business data here. What I like to think of is basically data that isn’t conventionally available in the feed. So this could be, you know, a very popular example with smart shopping campaigns was to have campaigns per margin.

So I’ve got also like a, kind of a graphic about. About how you can achieve something like that in performance max, because it does look a little bit different. The

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: basic points here then is the structures that you may have maintained for smart shopping campaigns. You can sort of port them over and there’s the nuance of the ad group became the asset group, the product group became the listing group.

But by and large, you can sort of massage it to, I

MENACHEM ANI: was just going to say one of the main differences with, with performance max is you can have multiple asset groups in a campaign, whereas smart shopping, you only had one. So that’s definitely something you can take advantage of.

MIKE RYAN: Exactly. I actually think performance max is I mean, an improvement in the end on smart shopping.

I think that you can pursue more sophisticated strategies and structures in here. I think it’s great with the audience signals, although there’s you know, topics there to discuss as well. But yeah, in a nutshell, you know, you can take data like it could be anything. It could be sell through rates.

If you’ve got products that need increased advertising pressure because they’re behind sales plan, or you’ve got products that are on the verge of stocking out and you want to slow them down a little bit whatever the case might be, things that Google isn’t going to necessarily know. Again, when we talk about that portfolio quality where they can overcompensate or undercompensate in the end, you’re talking about averaging and Some people don’t like that average, there’s a lot of detail or nuance that gets lost in the averaging thing like that to explain the graphic here shortly, then we can get back to you know, more free flowing conversation.

But in a nutshell, you can make an asset group, for example, for bicycles, for bike clothing, and then a catch all. Just as a super simple example, and then,

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: right. And then to uplevel it a little bit. So for people not seeing the visual, there would be one campaign here, which is the high margin campaign.

You have a different one for mid margin and a different one for low margin. We’re talking now about the high margin campaign, having three asset groups for the different product types. Yeah, exactly. And then

MIKE RYAN: how do you bring margin in there? Like, so first off these asset groups, they’re each having, they’re covering the theme.

They’re making sure that there’s a thematic kind of logic here. So that way you’re tackling this. And then at the listing group, you can use the custom label to then pull these high margin products. And yeah. And you just kind of combine high margin and bicycle. And then that high margin campaign is now able to serve that.

And then you would replicate this kind of a logic with your mid margin and low margin or whatever criteria you bring into play here. So that you’ve just, you’re tackling theme with the asset groups, and then you’re using your listing groups and custom label, for example, and then. To then bring in other kinds of business information.

And this allows you to feed information ultimately to performance max that it wouldn’t otherwise have access to.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Okay. I think that’s a, you know, great advice here for people looking at how to structure these campaigns. And, and I think part of the point here of having high margin, low margin, mid margin has to do with your budget allocation as well as your target ROAS setting.

Let’s talk about target ROAS. Menachem, how do you typically set up your campaigns and how, how does ROAS? Sure. So

MENACHEM ANI: I think it really depends on the data that the, that the system has, you know, so for a newer account where Google ads doesn’t have much conversion data, If we’re starting out with performance max, we’ll probably start out with just maximize conversions without a target ROAS option and let the system just gather data and then input your target a few weeks later.

Whereas if it’s an account that’s, you know, already been steady for a while, whether it’s standard shopping or smart shopping, we’ll pretty much put in the ROAS targets. That are on par with what we’re, we’ve been seeing on the other campaign types and that we’re hoping to see in the future, but we’ll also sometimes segment those into different campaigns.

Like Mike mentioned, if there are campaigns around higher margin, a lower margin, a set targets that match those specific business goals.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: And you said you started maximizing conversions or you started maximizing? So with,

MENACHEM ANI: with smart shopping I mean, sorry, with performance max, you basically have two options.

You can do maximize conversions or conversion value. Typically, I like to do just start with max conversions and this way it gets more conversions through the system. Once it has a bit of data, then I’ll switch it over to to maximize conversion value with a target raw as setting.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: But along the way, even if you’re doing maximize conversions, you are still reporting.

So

MENACHEM ANI: if you’re doing maximized conversions as a bid strategy, then you get to put in a target CPA. So we’ll do that for some clients that, that sort of measure it in a different way, if it’s more of a, maybe a replenishable or consumable product, where the goal is more of a customer acquisition cost. So then we’ll send, we’ll stick it.

To that strategy. But if it’s if it’s a, you know, more e commerce, retail is focused on the row as and so we’ll typically migrate from max conversions to max conversion value and input a row as target as it as the system has a bit more data. We usually only leave it there for a few weeks just to get it going.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Exactly. So the point I’m trying to make is even though you might use maximize conversions and the target CPA still report your conversion values so that when you do that switch over all the data is there. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Okay. And that makes sense. And that’s also an interesting distinction, right?

If you have more of a, a single product that you’re selling and it’s more about customer acquisition for like subscription, nutrition supplements, for example, then a TCPA could be very effective, but if it’s more of a varied catalog of thousands of products with different values, then eventually you do want to do that.

That’s another great distinction

MENACHEM ANI: between smart shopping and performance max with smart shopping, there’s no option to do target CPA. Performance Magnus Max, which is built for more than just retail, gives you that option and it is very useful for, you know, brands that are selling supplements or any kind of consumable product.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Now, Mike I mean, you’re famously known for having said that T Rolax is not really that smart. I didn’t know it was

MIKE RYAN: famously known for anything. I mean, so it’s very, it’s very pragmatic advice that Menachem Offred and I agree, I think it’s a great to. You know, you can kind of seed or flood new campaign.

You could also, by the way, if you’ve got if you know your product life cycle you could also have a campaign that’s constantly rotating in and out new products that are new, new to your catalog. I mean, And, and flood those with a max conversion value strategy, for example. And then as they mature, as they get out of a launch phase, you can then move them into automatically into a campaign with a, a row, a roast target on there.

But you know, it’s, I don’t, yeah, target roast. I guess my. My problem here, it’s fine to have a ROAS target assigned to a campaign and this is the way the technology works, you need to do that in the end effect. My problem is when people view return on ad spend as a goal in and of itself because I don’t think as marketers that our goal is to achieve a return on ad spend.

This is just kind of a, An efficiency metric, it’s something along the way, I think, you know, it’s often getting conflated with return on investment or with profit. And that’s something that makes a lot more sense to me. So to me, we’re at a point here with performance max, we don’t want to be micromanaging these campaigns anymore.

So you don’t want to build them out in this ultra granular way that we, that can still make sense with the standard shopping campaign and certain use cases. And the other thing is like, then what is, what is rows for us? Because I like to use it as just. Not a goal to achieve that, that we as marketers are somehow responsible for.

Google’s technology is supposed to deliver on this. And then for us, it’s what is the significance of this ROAS target? It’s a way of pacing budget. So. Of course, paid search classically is this demand capture channel. People are searching for something. There’s this existing search volume where then advertising inventory can get served in response to that.

It’s not necessarily a demand generation channel. Like there’s a stronger use case there with paid social, for example, where you can really do more push effect. And of course, Performance Max has all kinds of admin inventory in it, but a lot of it is still this search based traffic. And you, with these poll channels like that, that, that are not push channels you can make all the budget in the world available and it, it won’t necessarily matter.

You, you need to apply that Rose target to help paste the budget. And to me how much budget you apply to each of your campaigns and at which row target this is, this is about. Allocating and pacing budget, and it’s not about achieving profitability per se that there you can do other things like building in margin segments into your into your campaigns or directly tracking profit as conversion value.

Even working with the new value rules or newish value rules that exist in the ads interface. These to me are preferable actions into kind of bowing down to return on ad spend as a, as a metric, if that makes

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: sense. Totally makes sense. I mean, it’s a good lever to have. You just have to understand what it means.

And classically, I mean, you can go to an advertiser and you can say, would 600 percent or a 700 percent return on ad spend? Well, the logical answer that most people will give, I’ll, I’ll take the higher return on ad spend. Right. But you have to understand that in becoming more aggressive, you’re usually decreasing your position in the auction, which means your volume is going to go down, which means that, yeah, you’ll get it.

Right. Each sale is more profitable, but you get fewer sales in total. So your profit could actually go down. So you might’ve been better off at a 600 percent ROAS. And it’s not that easy to figure out what is that right ROAS. And so long as you understand what it is and what it does and why you have the target that you have, totally fine.

It’s great. It’s totally

MIKE RYAN: right. It’s just as bad to over deliver on ROAS as under deliver, and yet there’s this definite bias where people are way more worried about under delivering on ROAS.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: One of you brought up a good point, which was you get into situations now with automated bidding where certain products just don’t have a lot of volume.

And due to the lack of volume, it’s kind of this self reinforcing loop where the system doesn’t know what the conversion rate is going to be, you’re in an automated bidding system, so it doesn’t really test that product anymore. Yeah, these might be products you really wanted to prioritize. You really might want to get them out of the warehouse.

So, are there any tips and tricks for. Reviving these sort of low impression products that you don’t see getting a lot of exposure.

MENACHEM ANI: Yeah. So with, with performance max, there aren’t a ton of levers, but there definitely are things you can do. You know, so one of the things that I like to do is start at the data feed, make sure that your data feed is fully descriptive and has all the right keywords based on what you know about that product or any keyword research you’ve done so that it can enter more auctions.

But outside of that, and just within the campaign itself. The main, the main levers that you have available is like number one, the overall budget two is that bid strategy and KPI setting or target CPA or ROAS, and then really audience signals and add copy or creative. So if you have a certain product underneath there, that’s not getting the traffic it needs to be, you might need to break that into its own campaign.

Like Mike mentioned, maybe with a maximized conversion strategy, just to push more traffic behind it. Or sometimes even to just put it into a standard shopping campaign where you can maintain much stronger control, build up history behind that product ID, and then put it back into performance max, because the system does have that data on the historical level of the item idea as well.

And it also looks at the overall account level conversion. So those are some of the ways that I like to approach it.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah. So it feels like we’re going through this world where there needs to be more fluidity between campaign types and. You know, things go into regular shopping campaigns, like you said, where they have manual bids that you can really use to boost it up if the smart system doesn’t want to do it for you.

And then once they get the volume, they’ve proven themselves. Now you can give it back to performance max, where it’s automatically handled, or at the very least, you can put it in a regular shopping campaign, but together with automated bidding. But then it may lose volume again, and it has to come back, right?

So there’s this whole fluidity.

MIKE RYAN: Yeah, I love that advice about, building up that data, that persistent data at the item ID level. That’s that’s really interesting interesting use case for keeping these standard shopping campaigns around in parallel, for example. But I definitely agree. It’s about identifying these products.

The feed is probably more important now than ever, although Let’s see what happens with, I think, automating the feed more will be another big step in the future for Google as they, they look for more of these levers to automate. But

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: What do you mean by that? Automating the feed more? I mean, I

MIKE RYAN: think there’s a team at Google who’s, who’s kind of moonshot is to really just, you know, look at your website and not need a feed and just produce, you know, ads out of it.

And I think they’ve been working on it for a long time. I don’t know what kind of progress they make. But as they, you know, they’re working on this so called shopping graph which may be a little rebrand that now that shopping is less significant as a single panel, but where they’re looking to Understand the association between products and and things like reviews and price and all kinds of topics and, and just map all of these relationships and better understand the products.

They’ll never, there’s, there’s some industries with where G10s are less available or whatever the case might be where they’ll, they’ll have a hard time ever really doing that are and, you know, other industries where maybe they’re just, Getting really good maps or graphs of the, the head products, the best sellers and stuff like this.

But I think that’s another thing that can help kind of carry some of the weight that needed to be previously in this very structured feed data. I think they’re going to get stronger at a kind of an implicit or unstructured approach to learning about these, these products in your site and your offer and stuff like that.

But that’s. Maybe a little off topic. I don’t know.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: I think it is on topic, right? It’s I mean, I was talking about it too. It’s look at your feed and the completeness of the titles and the descriptions. And this is one thing that I keep going on about is we’re no longer in charge of ads. We’re no longer in charge of keywords, but the way that we communicate what we want to Google is sort of at the periphery of the ad system.

And having a good feed or in the case of what you’re saying, Mike, maybe we don’t even have feeds anymore. Maybe, maybe we have to do a lot of SEO work so that our site is really easy to understand to Google and it can generate a feed on the fly from that. But if we. You know, it’s, it’s kind of interesting because if you look at GPT three and Dolly, these AI systems, so you can ask it to make images of the last one I saw was like the Muppets and Mad Max right.

And so it understands what Mad Max was and it understands what a Muppet looks like, but if it doesn’t understand because you’ve mislabeled it on your website, well, it’s going to do some really weird things. Right. And that’s kind of where our roles may be shifting towards this. Really good data, because that’s what the machine requires to learn and

MIKE RYAN: do a good job

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: for us.

MIKE RYAN: But getting back to something in touch more practical for a second, although I personally, I love all the theoretical stuff too. But there’s approaches out there like for example, I think it’s a product hero in the Netherlands. They’ve got an approach like this where you take. Kind of basically the, the BCG quadrant, like the, the Boston consulting group, they’ve got this classic four square analysis of our quadrant analysis of like your star products, your dogs stuff like this.

And I think product hero rebranded it with like zombies and superheroes or something like this sidekicks villains, but in end effect, you can. Identify products based on different criteria that you are or are not satisfied with. And of course, take specific feed actions there or campaign breakouts or mechanisms to try and deal with this situation.

And, and. Give them a kick. Yeah.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Okay. Let’s shift to the next topic here. We wanted to talk about a bit, which was one of the strange things is as you go from shopping campaigns to performance max campaigns, you do get all these additional channels of inventory. So you get Gmail ads, you get YouTube ads, you get search display, discover Is that something you’re taking advantage of?

Or are you trying to mostly block that? And Mike, it’s a bit of your push pull type of scenarios. But Menachem, let’s hear from you first. What do you think about all these other channels that come with performance maps?

MENACHEM ANI: My approach is typically just try to take advantage of it. I think that anything Like Mike mentioned before, there are ways of setting up a performance max campaign with very limited or no assets outside of the data feeds so that it acts like a smart shopping campaign.

But I have a feeling that eventually those type of setups are not going to be allowed or Google will change the system to disallow it. So for me, I’d rather get ahead of it. You know, this is where the world is progressing to let’s take steps to get there. It’s, you know, ultimately Google makes the product and we just live in this world.

So. My goal is to figure out what’s the best way to take advantage of it, get the best performance from it. And I think that like one of the things that I like to look at, which is if you look at you know, when you drill down into a performance max campaign, there’s not really a lot of data, but there still is data available that you can look at on the, on the campaign level.

So for example, if you’re on your like all campaigns tab in Google ads, you can click on the landing page tab and it will actually show you traffic of all your campaigns and you can filter to only show traffic from your performance max campaign. So you can see where it’s sending traffic and that helps you understand, you know, is it the final URL from the asset group level or is it the product information from the product data feed?

So it helps you get a good understanding of the breakdown of where your traffic is going. Another thing you can look at is just by looking at the overall campaign spend versus the listing group spend. So that tells you how much of your ad spend is going towards ads created with your data feed versus created with the assets that you put in, in the creative asset group.

And so you get a good understanding of what the breakdown is between overall ad spend and, and shopping. And it’s not pure shopping again, it’s, it’s any, any ad unit created with your data from the data feed. But it gives you a good idea. And so you kind of use those to help you. Like if you’re seeing a lot of traffic go to non product URLs and it’s not performing, maybe shut off URL expansion on the campaign level.

And so to kind of use that to tweak your overall campaign settings, to get it to where you need to go.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Those are brilliant suggestions there. So check out your landing page to see the breakdown of where traffic is coming from and make sure you’re happy with your performance.

MIKE RYAN: That’s all really great stuff.

And just I would mention too, that you can exclude URLs. So there might be certain informational or non transactional pages on your website that you just want to entirely exclude. Now, I mean, for me, I feel like this is, these, these new placements are in a touch with overhyped because a lot of this stuff was already in place with smart shopping campaigns.

I mean, I’ve heard concerns about you know, Gmail placements getting served to people who have unsubscribed or have a kind of a do not touch thing with your company. And this could be concerning. Whether from a brand safety thing or even legal action. And I saw something very interesting about if you’re in a sensitive category or restricted category, like let’s say pharmaceuticals or something where certain kinds of inventory is just not valid in that category.

Anyway, does this make sense to me? The, the, really the biggest change here with performance max by far in terms of new inventory is that search inventory. And I think it’s also been the one that’s, you know, Been bothering people probably the most because there’s these topics about like, you know, brand cannibalization and there’s a lot of unclarity here.

So I think that’s, and it’s also just people, people are very, have been very intentional and focused on their search setups for a long time now. And of course that’s changed. Search has become more automated too. But I think that’s, that’s something that. Is probably one of the biggest changes now relative to smart shopping campaigns.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: So let’s talk about those pet peeves a little bit more. Right. So you brought up a big one. People say that there’s a lot of brand traffic going into performance max campaigns. And so that’s like not really getting you new customers. It’s very cheap traffic, so it makes the results look really good. There’s cannibalization from your search campaigns at some level.

I think there’s still like remarketing concerns and like what channels are really helping you maybe because audiences are a part of this, right? So are you really getting these new audiences these three concerns or any other concerns, pet peeves that you’ve heard? Have you guys found any solutions work around?

MENACHEM ANI: So to some extent, yes. Google. does allow you to block keywords, add negative keywords to performance max if you have a Google rep who can do it for you on the backend. So it’s not available to everybody, but if that’s something you don’t want to show up for and you have that access, I would definitely recommend, you know, getting that set up.

Another feature to Mike’s point that they rolled out later on due to feedback is you now have the ability to exclude audiences as well. So you can upload your customer list and exclude your existing customers or unsubscribers or things like that. So there are small ways to address it, but as an overarching theme, It definitely cannibalizes a bit too much on search for my comfort, especially for accounts that are doing really well on search and have been for years.

There’s a hesitancy to introduce performance max because of what it will do to those campaigns. Because while it takes precedence, it might not, like for example, if you have an account that’s spending, you know, A set daily budget, if you create a new performance max, even if it has a smaller budget, it can stop the other stuff from serving at all.

And then your account is now under spending completely not hitting sales targets, you know, because it’s not generating the right traffic. And so it definitely is tricky on accounts that are super reliant on search. I kind of wish they gave us an option to opt out of search, but I doubt that’ll come.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: So I know this was on Twitter, Mike, but you went to Rodney Ip’s session and friends of search and Rodney basically said that traffic from your search campaigns gets prioritized based on the keywords.

But then it got into this whole debate about, well, keyword matching has become much more loose on on search. And then how do we really know what maps to what and what does really take precedence? And I think. The industry in general is leaning towards your point that it’s, it is cannibalizing more than it should.

Google’s viewpoint is that it is still prioritizing your search keywords. But it almost seems like they’ve lost a little bit of control over what the machine perceives as exact match. Did that debate sort of come to a conclusion or are we basically left with two different viewpoints here?

MIKE RYAN: The funny thing about, about that I just I shared like a picture from his talk and, and this, and this statement.

And and then I actually, you know, I was at a conference and I, I couldn’t be replying to all these tweets and stuff. So this debate really unfolded as I more or less without me in, but there was, it was very passionate. And I chimed back in later on. So it was, I just thought it was a very interesting statement and I, I thought it might get a reaction, but I think the best place now to me, no, it feels open in the end.

The best place maybe is to check out Greg Finn’s really good coverage of that on Search engine lands and he wrote an article that kind of breaks down the statements that were made and there’s, you know, now this kind of bizarre perspective emerging that maybe we need to be building out these comprehensive lists of you know, of, of negative brand terms and stuff like that, which seems to then contradict previous best practices.

And I mean, I tried to. Politely ask Ginny Marvin at Google to you know, bring some more clarity and I’m sure they’re thinking about it because definitely there’s a lot of people talking about it.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah, exactly. And that was an interesting point about adding every imaginable version of your keyword, including plurals and misspellings, something we’ve definitely gotten away from, but the, the point was along the lines of, Google will consider it an exact match regardless of match type, but so long as the words are the same right.

And that’s not why you need all the misspellings potentially so that it is exactly the same. And it prioritizes your search campaign and doesn’t go to performance. Yeah, I think.

MENACHEM ANI: I think the tricky piece is that performance max is not supposed to cannibalize exact match, but it only does it for what they’re calling exact match with identical keywords.

So it doesn’t work the way exact match historically did. And so if you have a brand campaign, it’ll likely pick up searches for your brand itself. But if somebody searches for your brand name with reviews, coupons, anything that you don’t have. It’ll fall back into the performance max campaign and you really can’t see the performance of that.

That’s why I recommend blocking it if you can, and then have your, your branded search campaign, but even maven, maybe a standard shopping campaign with very low bids that won’t get any traffic besides for your brand, if it’s excluded from performance max.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Right. And because at the end of the day, the ad rank always factors in, right?

So bids do factor in here very much as well. There’s another interesting point. I can’t remember who brought this up, but supposedly there are campaign priorities for performance max, just like we’ve had with shopping, but you can only find them in the ads

MIKE RYAN: editor.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: I

MIKE RYAN: think we may be exchanged on this.

You and I met him on Twitter. Yeah. But because I really, I haven’t taken a lot farther. I just I had come back from a lengthy vacation and this kind of just came through one of our Slack channels. Someone, someone noticed this and but we haven’t played around with it also because you need to.

Find a client who, cause it’s like, Hey, I don’t know exactly if this works or what it does, when it does, it could be interesting, but by the way, can I gamble with your, with your hard earned money? So you know what I mean? So we, we really haven’t taken that a lot farther, but it’s, it’s in the ads editor, whether it actually works in the campaigns in themselves.

I’m doubtful, but I don’t know for sure. I don’t know if you check that out.

MENACHEM ANI: I haven’t really played with that. My guess is that it’s. Just doesn’t do anything, but we would probably need to ask somebody at Google to confirm on that. Yeah, I mean,

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: okay, and we’ll put this out to the community and everyone watching.

If you’ve tried this, put your comments in the chat or in the comments of the video and let people know if you think it actually works or not. Or if you want to record a little video clip, we’ll promote your video, but we’d love to know the answer. Good. So I think we’re coming pretty close to the end of the session here.

Is there anything that you guys think is really exciting about Performance Max that we haven’t talked about or anything about your companies that you want to share with our audience? Michael, let’s start with you.

MIKE RYAN: Well, my kind of Take on performance max I think it’s going to be here to stay. I think that they’re continually improving it.

You know, we see improved geographic targeting, come on, exclusions as mentioned, and they’ve got a lot of interesting stuff on their roadmap shared publicly to certain extents. I never know what is, it’s so always so blurry. What’s allowed to be said about their roadmap or whatnot.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Okay, so do you have like a favorite that you think publicly known?

I mean, I’m pretty sure

MIKE RYAN: it’s known by now that that auction insights are coming to performance max. Finally. So that for me, I’m a big fan of auction insights. I found them very valuable. So that’s something that I’m excited about because of course there’s this kind of new version of auction insights and the merchant center.

But then your, your classical auction insights In an ads reporting has not been available for performance max. And I just think there are questions that you can potentially answer this way. Yeah, I just see this as I, the way I always describe it. I think that this is the new Google ads.

Platform. And it’s just kind of incubating inside the old one. So whether we like it or not for better or worse, I mean, just this, this value proposition of serving all of Google’s ad inventory from one place. I think it’s, this is, this is definitely the strategy that they’re committed to. And so I think we need to enjoy it responsibly and approach it with skepticism and be not afraid to voice our criticisms.

But also now’s the time to be testing it and learning it. And if I didn’t talk too long already you can read some of my thoughts about this on the blog of Smarter Ecommerce, the company I’m at. You can also find me on, on LinkedIn or Twitter. My handle at both of those is at Mike Ryan retail, I’m very happy to connect on either of those platforms.

So I have a lot

MENACHEM ANI: of, a lot of a similar mindset, you know, for us, it’s always about first mover advantage, taking advantage of new features and functionality to get the best performance, but also the best costs for our clients. I mean, like I’ve, I’ve been doing this a long time. I set up my first. Merchant center feed on frugal in 2003.

So, like, it’s definitely changed a lot. And what I’ve learned is that you’re always going to have changes to the platform. You’ve got to stay ahead of the curve. The world is moving forward. You don’t want to get left behind. And like to Mike’s point, I do think that Google is very, very committed to this.

I’ve never seen them roll out something from alpha to beta to priority as as fast. And so if they’re putting that sense of urgency behind the rollout, we definitely need to do that on our end, too, and make sure we’re set up for success in the future for our clients.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: It’s fascinating, right? Because I think performance max is the easy button for a lot of advertisers who don’t have the level of sophistication of our listeners here.

I mean, I am hopeful that at least for a couple of years, we’ll continue to have controls and we’ll have the option of running search and shopping. In addition to performance max and Google even has a narrative around that where they say, well, performance max is a bit additive, right? And then whatever you find in that the insights you get, you bring them back to your other campaigns.

But that of course does become a little tricky when those campaigns, like we talked about, start cannibalizing each other and there’s lack of clarity around you know, what’s what does what. And I also, I think we have to keep in mind, Google is a big company. There’s different people working on different projects.

They may intend for things to work one way, but then when the rubber meets the road, different things happen which is why I think it’s so important we keep having these conversations with experts like the two of you to hear what actually happens, right? Not the theoretical design of PMAX, but the practical implications of it.

So thank you so much to both of you, our guests for joining today. Thanks everyone for watching. If you want to see more of these videos, be sure to subscribe on YouTube. You can also go to pptownhall. com and subscribe to our newsletter there. So you get notifications about new sessions. And follow our guests on Twitter, follow myself on Twitter at Silicon Vallaeys and at Optmyzr.

And then of course, if you need help implementing any of these strategies both of these guys run great agencies. So check them out. I myself run a tool company, Optmyzr. We have a two week free trial, so you can go ahead and try that. Got lots of tools to help you run retail campaigns better. So thanks again for watching and we’ll see you for the next episode.

Thank you. Thank you.