Inside Google Ads podcast: Episode 105 - PMax signals

Are your PMax audience signals actually doing anything or are they just a placebo designed to make you think you have some control over your campaign?

I've seen my clients spend hours crafting the perfect signal, layering custom segments, customer lists, interests, thinking they're telling Google exactly who they want to target. But the reality of how PMax actually works is quite different than what the interface may imply.

Today, we're diving deep into Performance Max audience signals and search themes, specifically questioning if those signals actually do any influencing at all and how to know how your PMax campaign is actually doing its targeting.

I'm your host, Jyll Saskin Gales. I spent six years working for big brands at Google, and now I work for you.

This is Inside Google Ads: Episode 105, Performance Max Signals.

First things first, do audience signals really matter? 

If you listen to what Google says, which is always a good starting point, they'll say that audience signals allow you to combine your expertise with Google's AI to jumpstart performance. It sounds like a partnership. You tell the machine who your customer is and the machine goes and finds them.

But if you look under the hood of how Performance Max works, the reality is a bit starker. You do not get to pick who you are targeting in PMax, at least not directly through your audience signal. 

You see, Performance Max is a goal-based campaign. Its primary directive, its only directive, is to achieve your conversion goal as determined by your bid strategy.

Let's say you give it an audience signal of luxury shoppers, but the AI finds that value shoppers are converting better and cheaper; PMax will completely ignore your signal and go to where the conversions are.

Now, I know you've heard me say before that a signal is just a signal and not true targeting, but what do we mean by that? And is a signal completely ignored? 

For example, in a Demand Gen campaign, if you pick an audience and you turn off optimized targeting, Google must respect your choice and will only show ads to the people who match your audience targeting. But in PMax, the whole thing runs on optimized targeting. In fact, if you review Help Center documentation from when PMax first launched, some of it's still there, it will say, Performance Max runs on optimized targeting. Google, very smartly in my opinion, rebranded optimized targeting, something practitioners hate, as the audience signal, something practitioners seem to love.

You feel like you are driving, like you're telling it where to go, but instead, you're just giving the GPS a suggestion of a route it should take to your destination. It's going to feel free to completely ignore that and find its own route if it feels like it's faster, better, cheaper.

Anecdotally, what I've seen hundreds of times is that if you use an audience signal, it works the exact same way as if you turn on optimized targeting in a Demand Gen or Display campaign. The campaign can target whoever it wants. It does not care about your signal or your original targeting choices. 

But what about search themes? Is that something more unique that PMax does that works differently?

Yes, it works differently, but functionally, I've drawn the same conclusion. 

Search themes are also an optional suggestion you can give to Google's AI. And just like audience signals, PMax may use your search themes to find initial traffic, but if it finds that those users are not converting, it's going to ignore those themes and go towards the queries where the conversions are happening.

If you need a deeper breakdown, by the way, on audience targeting versus audience signals and search themes and what they are, you should check out my bestselling book, Inside Google Ads, Everything You Need to Know About Audience Targeting, available on Amazon, Kobo, and Google Play. 

But back to search themes, they do have one key area where they are very different than audience signals, and that is keyword prioritization. If you're running Search campaigns and PMax and both of them are eligible to target the same queries, a system called keyword prioritization comes into play.

An Exact Match keyword in Search that exactly matches the user's search will win. But after that, Phrase Match, Broad Match, and search themes have equal priority. So if you have a Broad Match keyword in Search and a search theme in PMax that are the same and both are eligible, then ad rank determines the winner. But if you have an Exact Match keyword in Search and you also have that as a search theme in PMax, and the user's search exactly matches that keyword/search theme, then Exact Match will always win over PMax. In theory.

In practice, I've seen a lot of examples where this isn't necessarily the case mostly because an exactly matching query is so rare nowadays. So even a PMax with no search themes can often win out over Search because of ad rank and because of budget differences and bidding differences and all kinds of other factors. Although we do have this keyword prioritization exception, it's not as powerful as you might think it is.

As with audience signals, I'm not going to say don't use search themes, but don't spend too much time on them. Feel free to give it to your campaign as a starting point, maybe some missing context or if there are competitor terms you want, and then move on.

But this brings the search theme conundrum I talk about because let's say you add your search themes and then that does help your PMax and it does start using them to optimize… then that is an issue because that means that the PMax campaign couldn't find that intent from your landing page or your creative. So the search theme is just a band-aid. What you really need is to incorporate those keywords into your asset groups, onto your landing page. And then if you had done that, PMax would have found them anyway without your search themes, right?

That brings us to our final point today. How do you know if your audience signals are actually being used or if your search themes are actually being used?

We get to go to one of my absolute favorite places in Google Ads, the Insights tab. You'll find it on the left-hand side under Insights and Reports, then Insights. This used to be only available for Performance Max campaigns, but you'll actually now find this available for all campaign types. Of course, since PMax is fully automated, that's where it'll be the most useful. 

Scroll down on that tab. You may need to change it to last 28 days instead of the last seven days and then you'll see the various audiences that your PMax is optimizing for, which ones are driving more impressions, which ones are driving more clicks, and then if there's enough conversion data, which ones are driving the most conversions. If it is an audience that was included in your audience signal, it'll say signal next to it. If it is an audience that PMax found that was not included in your audience signal, it'll say optimized next to it, or optimized targeting.

Sometimes we'll look at PMax insights and just see optimized, optimized, optimized, optimized, the signal isn't even there, which tells us either you were wrong about who the ideal audience is, or you need to adjust your creative, your conversion tracking, your bid strategy, et cetera, if you want to force PMax to actually show to that audience. Or leave PMax doing what it's doing and use Demand Gen instead if you want to control the audience who sees your ads.

For search themes, you can just check the search terms report and see how Google is showing ads that are related to or the same as your search themes. I find it really helpful to export a Search Terms Report from PMax and from Search if you are running both, and then compare them in a spreadsheet to see how much overlap there is.

If you want to know if you would have served on those searches anyway, even without search themes, when you're looking at your asset group view, there'll be this little green squiggly arrow that will tell you if PMax is using certain search themes to optimize. And again, I view this as kind of a pro/con because if it did have to use that, that means that key information was not in your asset group or your landing page where it needed to be. And then if it's not using that search theme then, well, it's not using the search themes - that's not working well for you.

We covered a lot of ground. So if your audience signals and search themes are mere suggestions, which more likely than not can just be completely ignored by Google's AI, then how do you actually drive performance with PMax? 

You guessed it. It comes down to your bid strategy, conversion tracking, and creative.

Your bid strategy is how you tell PMax what to do. So telling it to Maximize Conversions, for example, will tell it to find the cheapest possible conversion so it can get as many as possible. Whereas, if you tell it to optimize for a certain ROAS via Target ROAS, it's not going to look for the cheapest conversions, it's going to look for the ones that are going to bring the most value per unit of cost, which could lead to totally different audiences and totally different searches than Maximize Conversions would.

If you run Meta ads, by the way, this is really the entire premise of the Andromeda Update everyone's freaking out about, that your creative itself is what drives your targeting. If you want to control the targeting, adjust your creatives so that it will appeal to different kinds of users and therefore your ads will be shown more to those kinds of users.

Next, conversion quality. If your conversion is a purchase, then that's real money in the bank. If it's just a form fill, you're going to want to ensure you're using offline conversion tracking in order to ensure you are maintaining high quality conversions via high quality audiences and searches.

And then last but not least, asset group consolidation. A common mistake I see is people creating a PMax campaign with five different asset groups, same creative in all of them and different audience signals and search themes. And that is completely backwards of how you want to do it. The reason to have a different asset group is because you have different assets. So if you only have one set of assets, you only need one asset group. If you want to appeal to different kinds of audiences, you need to have different assets that will speak to them. 

For example, the luxury shopper and the value shopper are going to be interested in very different products if you cater to both. So one asset group should show your higher end and more luxury products to appeal to that audience. And another asset group should show your more affordable and more accessible products to appeal to that audience.

To wrap up, does this mean that you should leave your audience signals and search themes blank? 

You could, I'm not going to say that's my recommendation though. Especially for a new campaign, it doesn't hurt to give it that head start. Upload your customer list, put in some of those high-intent segments, add your ideal search themes, but don't obsess over it. Don't spend more than five minutes on your signals and search themes.

And once a campaign is already running, don't think that tweaking these signals or themes is going to fix a campaign that has bad creative or the wrong bid strategy. Changing your audience signal or search themes is not an optimization lever for an already running PMax campaign.

To learn how to actually optimize a Performance Max campaign, you can join my course Inside Google Ads at learn.jyll.ca. How to optimize Performance Max is one of more than 100 tutorials I have covering every campaign type in Google Ads, from Search to Shopping and Demand Gen, as well as local services ads and app campaigns.

You can learn more about Inside Google Ads and see whether it's the right fit for you at learn.jyll.ca. That's J-Y-L-L dot C-A.

To summarize our conversation around PMax signals today:

1. Signals are at best a suggestion and at worst a placebo. You don't need to not do them, but don't spend too much time on them.

2. Check your insights. Look at your audience insights to see how your audience signals are acting or not acting, and look at your Search Terms Report to see how your search themes are acting or not acting.

3. Focus on your creative to truly drive the targeting of your PMax campaign.

4. None of this is going to work without accurate full funnel conversion tracking and the right bid strategy for your goals.

Today's Insider Challenge is this. You have a client who is a chain restaurant. You launch a PMax campaign with an audience signal around business professionals, people who like to dine out, and a customer list of past diners. You also add search themes for relevant terms like “date night restaurant,” “pizza restaurant near me,” et cetera. Three weeks later, you check the audience insights tab and you see that the top converting segment is cooking enthusiasts. And when you check the Search Terms Report, you see a lot of brand traffic that you didn't exclude. The campaign is spending its budget, achieving its goals as set by its bid strategy and conversion tracking, but the client is complaining that they aren't seeing an increase in diners. What do you do? What's your next move? 

Remember, the beauty of the Insider Challenge is there's no right or wrong answer, just an opportunity to stretch your brain on real life Google Ads problem solving. 

The last Insider Challenge in Episode 103 was this. Let's say you have a dozen keywords and half of them are showing and half of them are rarely shown due to low quality score. You try to improve the quality score on those keywords following some of the suggestions here today and after two months they're still rarely showing due to low quality. What do you do? Do you leave the keywords there? Do you pause them? Why?

What I would say is that since you spent two months trying to improve quality score without success, you've likely hit a wall where Google just does not view your ads or landing page as relevant enough for those specific user queries, at least compared to your competitors.

If you leave the keywords active, there's no penalty, there's no harm. They have the potential to serve in the future if the competitive landscape changes, but it can create more account clutter having all these keywords that aren't serving and make it harder to analyze and optimize your account. It's possible that Google will just automatically pause them for you as they do with zero impression keywords after, I believe it's 14 months, but don't quote me on that.

If you pause the keywords, it allows you to take all that time you were spending on fixing the dogs, so to speak, and instead focus on optimizing and improving your winners further. It would simplify your account structure. However, there's this theoretical lost future opportunity, too. Personally, I would probably just leave the keywords there, but pivot to a different strategy. If I really want to serve ads to people searching for these keywords and I can't due to low quality score, I would create a custom segment based on search terms, use those keywords as the search terms, and then put a small Demand Gen budget behind it. That way I can reach those exact same people who are searching for my low quality score keywords, just not in the actual moment of search. And then by having image and video creative in Demand Gen, perhaps I could appeal to them and get them to check out my business in another way. 

What about you? What would you do?

I'm Jyll Saskin Gales, and I'll see you next time Inside Google Ads.