WRP TV Episode 7: The Pitfalls of Google’s Performance Max Campaigns
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Summary
In this episode, Gary Reid is joined by Lucy and Jen to discuss Performance Max, an advertising format on Google. They cover topics such as the complexity of performance max, the importance of patience, the timing and planning of campaigns, the need for conversions and volume, the use of audience signals and assets, and the available bidding strategies. They also touch on the limitations of performance max, such as the lack of transparency and control, and the reliance on scripts for data insights.
Key Chapters
Introduction to Performance Max
Understanding the Complexity of Performance Max
Conversion volume and its impact on PMAX
Limitations of PMAX: Audience signals and exclusions
The significance of assets in Performance Max campaigns
The Role of Conversions and Volume in Performance Max
Enhancing Performance with Audience Signals and Assets
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Transcript
Hi and welcome to WRP TV and this is episode seven and I'm Gary Reid your Host. I'm joined today by Lucy McNeile, who's PPC director and by Jen Grant, who's head of performance. And today we're going to be talking about performance max, which is a way of advertising on Google that they brought in in 2020. Some say it destroyed Google ads and others disagree with that.
But what we want go through today is, so basically, performance max can be all-consuming. It can do everything from YouTube ads, display ads, shopping ads, take over your brand ads, do generic ads, advertise where you don't want be, where you do want be. So it really does, although it's supposed to simplify everything, make everything easy, it possibly doesn't unless you know the actual details of how to optimize it properly. And the other thing that's really important, but I'm sure the guys are going to cover this, is, patience is absolutely necessary.
Whereas before you could make a change to an ad campaign or an ad and see the results within a few hours, this can take weeks, if not months, depending on how much budget and how many visitors you have to your site and how many conversions that you have to how that works. So it makes it really difficult to make quick changes to your account. And that's the other thing is once you've got things running, you can't be continually changing it because it'll just completely send it back into learning again. But anyway, that's enough from me. I'm going to hand over the guys and just go through some of the things that we look out for, which I think will help you with your PMAX campaigns.
If you're looking at just testing Performance Max, you can do it using the experiment function. So that would be the kind of recommendation, I guess, if you're kind of just branching into.
Performance Max as a new campaign type, because you're then kind of more easily able to compare it to the structure of campaigns you've already got running and see kind of more of a like for like comparison, see if it actually will work for your account or not. And then if you are kind of going down the route of launching Performance Max, it's definitely good to bear in mind a kind of two week ramp up period. And that's...
campaign first goes live. And then on top of that, there's like a kind of four to six week period where it will still be kind of going through learning and optimizing, which needs to be taken into account plus any conversion lag time that you have. So, you know, if it's a product or a service where there's a quite a hefty conversion lag versus like when someone actually...
when someone clicks to actually converts on your website, that also needs to be taken into account when you're kind of analyzing the results of PMAX. So yeah, definitely a key one to kind of mention upfront, I guess. Yeah. So if you've got someone who's selling, you know, t -shirts at 15, 20 pounds, completely different to someone who might be selling furniture at three or four thousand pounds a piece.
where that, like you say, that conversion lag could be weeks as well. So that, I mean that, it could be stretching into three months or four months before you actually have a performance max campaign that is running effectively. That's a long time, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. And I guess even within that, it's how many conversions you're even able to drive.
Yeah, to as to kind of whether or not that format is really going to work for you because if you're not getting the kind of minimum of around 30 conversions a month or within a 30 day period, you're not really going to be able to kind of reap the rewards from that ad format. So, you know, it is one that's, you know, beneficial for the kind of higher volume accounts.
something that we always check, you know, does the does the PMAX campaign have 30 conversions in the last 30 days? And you'd be surprised how many actually don't. And if they don't have that volume, then is that actually the right campaign type for your business? Like, it's probably worth testing and like worth seeing how it how it does perform.
But actually, it may be that if you're not getting that level of conversion, standard shopping actually might work better in terms of being able to have a slightly lower volume, but still take advantage of sort of shopping feed ads. Because I think if you're not getting that volume of convergence through shopping, what PMAX will try and do is push your ads on display, on video, and on these other, you know, other networks that actually still may not drive sales, but they'll drive more traffic and they'll be able to learn more quickly what works and what doesn't work. So definitely trying to find a balance between. Yeah.
What works and what doesn't work for your business. So you've got this, so obviously you've got this huge time lag that at the beginning of setting up a campaign or if you're making you know sort of changes to a campaign. The, I guess you know the other thing is you know what is the best way of looking at that you know if
If shopping, if you've got a product and shopping is where 90 % of your sales can forget brand for a minute, then would you be better off just sticking to the standard shopping campaign? Or have those sort of become redundant because of PMAX now and really you've got to move on to a PMAX campaign? I guess probably the answer is it depends. There probably isn't a back and might answer. So we do have some clients where we test.
We actually run both PMAX and brand standard shopping. So negating your sort of brand terms from your PMAX activity for a client, say, who doesn't want to appear on brand search ads if they want organic to pick that up and there's not much competition on the brand search side. There are cases where that might be sort of applicable and worth doing. And we do have clients that have success both through using PMAX to kind of mop up generics on both.
and shopping and brand shopping still to run and capture sales. So it's not to say it's kind of standard shopping is redundant with PMAX there, but I think you will often find that PMAX, say if you had a standard shopping and a PMAX campaign, both of exactly the same products with no sort of brand exclusions, your PMAX campaign would pick up all that traffic and would sort of override the standard shopping campaign. So you're going to use both. I think it's just about working out a strategy, you know.
Are there certain products that you know are struggling to hit that conversion threshold, but you want to try and standard shopping and negate from your PMAX campaign, for example? Or is it based on kind of the searches that you want to match to your PMAX versus standard shopping? So exclusions have become important then in a PMAX campaign. What you want in the PMAX campaign, what you don't want in the PMAX campaign and how much sort of control do you have over exclusions? Is that something you can do quite easily?
Not as easily as you'd hope. Well, I guess it comes in kind of different layers, I suppose. So when it comes to kind of product exclusions, that's kind of obviously very doable within the product feed. So you're able to obviously apply perhaps labels or custom labels where you can filter out obviously which products you want to target and don't want to target.
So the kind of product level exclusions are definitely still as easy to do as they were within a kind of shopping campaign. Because you can just select a kind of group of products you want to include within Performance Max. The kind of keywords exclusions are a bit trickier because currently there's no way to, or Google doesn't allow you to add those in yourself in terms of kind of a negative keyword list.
As you would have across like your search campaigns or your kind of standard shopping campaigns. So you can do it by kind of submitting the list through the Google kind of help system and they will apply it for you on the backend. And I think, you know, it is possible that they might be bringing out, you know, new.
New abilities to be able to actually implement those things yourself. I mean, it's crazy, isn't it? Because the other thing, you know, you don't have access to do that in the interface itself. Considering the size of Google, how much money they have brought out something that's been out now for almost three years and still doesn't have that is quite astounding. But also you don't get really much insight back from a PMACS campaign. So you don't get that data back at that level either, do you?
No, well, I guess not unless you're using scripts within the Google Ads interface so that you can pull that data and manipulate it into something that's much more workable as an insight and be able to actually use that for seeing things like the search queries and then using that to feed back into optimizations. So yeah, there are ways around that.
Um, and definitely a recommendation from our side is to, to be implementing performance Mac scripts. So you can see the data, um, be pulled out and kind of manipulate it. How you. Yeah. I think that's, that's definitely been one of the biggest frustrations from advertisers is that lack of transparency. And as Lucy said, like you really do need to be having a script that's connected to the API to get all of the information out.
That is relevant because otherwise I think you just get this, you get some recommendations like it will show you search themes, it might show you some sort of like audience recommendations, but there's really no visibility within the Google Ads platform on platforms. Your performance max campaigns have showed on or a breakdown of the search terms it's matching to. And those are all really useful things as well for kind of building out other activities. So,
On some clients will use the PMAX script to kind of mine keywords. So like we used to do with DSA campaigns, you know, let's see what's matching to them. Let's try and build that out as a search keyword campaign and see if we can gain any efficiencies there by just bidding on very specific keywords and not necessarily picking it up through PMAX. Always worth a test because PMAX might still work better, you never know. Yeah. But this is...
It's just Google sort of saying, oh, just leave it to us. We're pretty good at this. We'll look after this campaign for you in the background. And it sort of historically doesn't work out that well. We've all been in those meetings with Google, where they recommend things which probably aren't really going to get the results that a client wants, but definitely going to get some spend through. And PMAX definitely feels like one of those. So.
To get the insights, really, you've got to have those scripts. And it's not even getting insights. Actually, just to get the information to manage the account, you need those scripts, yeah? Yeah, definitely. Yeah. I guess anything, as with like anything automated as well, it's only ever as good as the inputs that you can give it. So if you've got a client that has, there's an e -commerce client, and as we were saying earlier, like they sell t -shirts, they've got hundreds of sales going through those campaigns every day.
PMAX might work great for them. If you've got a client who's selling a product where they barely hit that 30 conversions threshold a month, there's not that much information the algorithm has to actually know who does buy products, like what should I optimize, who should I bid up or down on, based on age, gender, audience, and all of these signals. If it doesn't have enough information, it won't optimize effectively. So you really need a human person checking the data as well.
And kind of guiding the algorithm with the changes that need to be made. And what about things like audience signals and uploading customer lists and email lists and things like that? Does that number one, does that help PMAX learn a bit quicker so we can bring down that initial phase? And number two, does that help with some of the things you were just saying there, Jen, about, you know, not not having all of the signals from purchases if you've got that?
That sort of audience signal listed there or something like that. I think it definitely helps PMAX to identify like who is similar to your existing customers. And it's a good bet that if someone's similar to your existing customer, they're probably going to buy from you. So I would say, yeah, I think that does definitely help to kind of speed up that learning process. No kind of specific timeframe on how much speed you'll get by adding those audiences. But.
As they in our experience, it definitely kind of does, does help to speed up that process. Sorry, what was your first question again? Well, the other thing actually, which I think is really, maybe that was around audience signals, does it help speed it up? And also does it, if you've, if you've got a low number of conversions in a month, can it help fill some of that gap? If you've got an audience, but I'm guessing from what you said, it's sort of yes and no, it might, but there again, it might not, but if you conversion that like probably the audience is too wide to to try to spread out sorry to try and pick them off like that.
But I think I think the other thing which is there's always seems to be a lot of talk around and also where you know clients now sort of get surprised when we keep asking them for assets. So we will start asking clients now for videos and images and things like that and assets have become really important to a performance match campaign.
Yeah, definitely. I guess previously when kind of PMAX was released, you could run the campaign with just a kind of shopping feed, which obviously contains all of the necessary kind of product specific assets that you would otherwise manually input to the campaign. And that would essentially run as like a smart shopping, I guess, what used to be smart shopping. It would.
Yeah, kind of it took over from that. So it would really just run across shopping placements still and would use all of your assets and attributes that you have within the product feed. You're not able to do that anymore. So if you are setting up a kind of performance max campaign from now onwards, you will have to add in image assets, text assets for headlines and descriptions.
As well as I mean it is suggested that you add videos and one thing to actually watch out for is if you don't put video assets in Google will create their own so That doesn't sound great does it? And they are very kind of Basic in terms of the the kind of video format so it's not you're no longer able to kind of ignore I guess the
the different attributes it's asking you to input and be able to just think that nothing happens if you ignore them. So yeah, definitely watch out for those. And again, if you're not running any external scripts, you won't be able to kind of dig into what those assets are that Google's creating for you. And you won't then have insight if you are seeing, you know, loads of impressions and it's showing across YouTube, you won't even have a clue what that asset it's showing is because it will have created itself. So yeah, it's really important to kind of make sure you you're using really high quality image and video assets across that campaign. Just in case your ads are showing across different platforms, even if you think, you know, predominantly they'll be showing across search or across shopping, definitely apply them into the campaign anyway. Because otherwise you will be getting the Google created one. One thing Google is plugging a lot at the moment as well is like search generative AI images. So something that's coming to PMAX is the ability to sort of plug in some text and Google will kind of generate its own image for you to use in campaigns. So.
I think they are aware that not everyone actually has the resource to be, you know, spending hundreds of pounds on getting really nice lifestyle images for PMAX. So that's another option that is sort of coming, I think in the next month or so. That's interesting to see how that kind of performs. Let's hope it's better than the videos that they did, but I'm sure it will. Fingers crossed. The other thing that's obviously going to be important on this is, been in strategies as well. Now,
Is there only two bidding strategies that you can actually use on PMAX or is there more that you can sort of apply to?
Just two. Sadly, only two. It's all very heavily conversion based. So yeah, if you are an advertiser who struggles to get that conversion volume, it is really tricky because it does rely so heavily on, it's like either maximized conversions or maximized conversion value. So if you're not getting enough conversions and you want to use PMAX, it may mean trying to use other sort of.
Not purchases, but somewhere, another sort of micro conversion or something on the way to the path to conversion and kind of marking that as a conversion in order for PMAX to bid towards. But it's not sort of optimal, as optimal as what you want to achieve, which is that final sort of point of sale. And if you're using that maximized conversions, basically, it's great if you're going for growth. If you're trying to get as many conversions as you possibly can,
That's, that's the one to go for. But if you're actually trying to just get the profitable conversions, then conversion value is probably the best one to go for, I guess. Yeah, definitely. And you're, you're also able to use kind of target ROAS within that. So, if you've got, you know, the volume coming through and you can set a ROAS target that meets your business goals, but also fits in with kind of.
What the historic data on that campaign is, it's definitely recommended to do that because that will be kind of the most efficient way to use that campaign type. Yeah. Well, look, I think that's great. I think we've covered an awful lot on PMAX there. And, you know, looking at my notes, it looks like we've covered nine things. We've talked about patience because it takes so long to get those campaigns up and running and it's not going to happen in a day. And you're going to see who.
Performance out those at the beginning. Feeds are really important, so you've got to have an optimized product feed, and that's got to be up to scratch, and it's a great way of optimizing PMAX campaign. You've got the exclusions, make sure that you're using the right exclusions, and it sounds like there's quite a few traps with PMAX that you've got to watch out for. But also assets, and I know some
Some clients are going to struggle with that and finding the right assets. Bidding strategies, another one. One that we sort of haven't really touched on would be sort of ad extensions and how they work inside PMAX. Because obviously, you know, you would have had all of those different types of ad extensions, site links, call outs, all of those things. Are those still part of PMAX or is that now just...all made up by Google when you put in all the headlines and all the different secondary headlines and things like that. Yeah, you are able to add them. Again, it's slightly hidden within the kind of campaign setup. So you want to, it's kind of under a drop down after you've added all the other assets to your campaign, you want to make sure that you're kind of clicking into the extras and adding those specific extensions.
Because, yeah, unless things are added, I guess, at an account level, you're then unlikely to kind of have them showing. Or if you've got the kind of more automated kind of, what's it called? A little slider. If you've got those set up, it allows Google to, again, create its own extensions. So, yeah.
Definitely important to kind of click through and make sure you're picking relevant ones. Cool.
Well, look, that's all from us this week. And thanks, guys, for talking about PMAX. If you need any help with PPC, Paired Social or Amazon, please get in touch. Our email address is hello@wrp.team. And that's it for this week. Thanks for watching. Bye.
