Inside Google Ads podcast: Episode 5 - Performance Max

Should you run Performance Max campaigns or stick to Standard Shopping? Or maybe just Search? Or maybe try a feed-only version?

Let's go Inside Google Ads to answer your burning questions about Performance Max. 

I'm your host, Jyll Saskin Gales, bringing you more than a decade of Google Ads experience. I worked at Google for six years and now I'm a marketing coach, consultant, teacher, content creator, speaker, author and podcast host. I've worked with more than 10,000 Google Ads accounts, showing business owners and marketers how to make more money from paid ads, and now I'm here to do the same for you every week for free.

The way each episode works is this. I pick three of your burning questions to answer in detail from the hundreds of comments I receive on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Threads. You can find all those links in the show description, and if you want a chance to get your problem solved in a future episode, drop a comment on any of my social media. Remember, my Inside Google Ads course members get to do this with me live every month on an exclusive one hour call.

Now, before we dive into today, I want to respond to some comments I've been getting on social media. Like, why didn't you answer my question yet, Jyll?

So first of all, thank you so much for listening to the podcast and taking the time to ask me your questions. I love getting to engage with you. It is exactly why I do what I do, and exactly why I set up the podcast like this.

Second, you should know that I produce this podcast in four episode bursts. So right now, this is the February 29th, 2024 episode, but I planned this episode's content in January, and I'm recording this episode in early February. So, if you ask me a question today, it will take at least six to eight weeks to make it into an episode.

Third, each episode has a theme, like Bidding or Audience Targeting, or today's theme, Performance Max. That means that even though you ask me a great question, I may not get to it until I have other great questions around similar themes.

For example, in my question bank right now, I have two awesome questions about how to hire someone to manage your Google Ads, but until I get a third, I won't be recording an episode about that.

Okay, I hope that you keep asking me your questions on TikTok, Instagram, Threads, LinkedIn, YouTube, links are on the episode description.

And now, let's get to our first burning question about Performance Max. Brandon on TikTok kept it simple. He asked PMax versus Standard Shopping, which do you prefer?

So, my short answer is Standard Shopping. 

Let's give you the medium answer. If you're working with a new Google Ads account, you absolutely want to start with Standard Shopping in my opinion. That's because if you launch a Standard Shopping campaign and then it doesn't work well, it doesn't get the performance you want, there's no way a PMax is going to get better performance because PMax has all kinds of other stuff in there like Display and Demand Gen and Video that's not going to have the same ROAS or the same conversion rate a Standard Shopping would. 

If you were to just start by launching a PMax and then you don't get good results, you have no idea what the issue is… is the issue your feed? Or your assets? Is it your website?

So, I recommend starting with Standard Shopping. 

Same if you have a small budget, which for PMax I define as less than $50 a day just for the one campaign, again - I would recommend starting with Standard Shopping. 

If you're an unknown brand or a new brand, like you have no brand search volume or minimal brand search volume, people are going to be discovering you for the first time - again, I recommend starting with Standard Shopping in that scenario. 

So, when should you use Performance Max? Because it absolutely can be a great campaign type.

If you're running Standard Shopping and a combination of other campaign types, or if you're not an ecommerce business – by the way, you don't have to run Shopping - but if you're running some Search, if applicable, some Shopping, and then some kind of image- or video-based ads that are working well for your business (however you define working well for your business) then it could be a good idea to test Performance Max. 

Although Performance Max won't give you as much transparency as the other campaign types, it does make management simpler to just have one campaign with one budget, doing what it's got to do to drive value for your business, rather than managing all these separate campaign types. 

So, if you have a Google Ads account that is performing well, you want to scale, you want to grow, PMax is great.

If you want to generate more demand, kind of go up the funnel, you're maxing out your brand search and your remarketing opportunity, you want to do something more, Performance Max can be great for that too, but you will have to spend, in my experience, at least $50 per day for a good amount of time to really get it scaling up and working for your business.

So, that is why I personally do not consider Performance Max a good option for beginners. If you are an ecommerce beginner, start with Standard Shopping. Not ecommerce, instead start with Search.

Are you enjoying the Inside Google Ads podcast? I'm sure you have a friend or colleague who would too, so go ahead and share this episode with them. They'll thank you and I'll thank you, too.

Our next question is also for ecommerce advertisers, but don't worry service-based businesses, your time is coming with question three.

So, Riley on TikTok asks, what are your thoughts on feed-only PMax campaigns? 

So, first of all, what is a feed-only PMax campaign?

This is a workaround that some Google Ads practitioners figured out where you can launch an asset group with just your Google Merchant Center feed. You don't add any headlines or images or descriptions or anything, just the feed. If you want to know how to do that, Zato Marketing has a tutorial on their website. That's Z-A-T-O Marketing. 

Personally, I'm not a fan of this workaround of launching a feed-only PMax campaign. Why? 

Firstly, it's a workaround. It is not a “working as intended” kind of thing, and Google tends to shut those things down, in my experience. So, what if you launch this feed-only PMax, it works really great for you, and then suddenly Google cuts off that functionality? You can't run it anymore and then you're back to square one. 

I don't think this is going to be around forever, so if you want to take advantage of it now - by all means. But I don't like to start launching a campaign that I know I'm going to have to shut down at some point.

For example, a few years ago when Google was getting rid of the Broad Match Modifier match type (that was when you could put a +, whatever) I started working with this business while I still worked at Google, so I was just advising them, and I was so tempted to be like, “Well, we have a few more months left for Broad Match Modifier. Let's do it.” 

But then I knew they'd be completely buggered after that when they had to manage this account and the Broad Match Modifier would no longer work as intended.

So the moment Google announces something's going away, I like to wean myself off of it, I'm using it, and get used to the new normal, rather than be stuck using something that I won't be able to use for much longer.

So, that's one reason why I don't like it. The other reason is because you don't need to do that. When people are running a feed-only PMax, what they're trying to do is recreate a Smart Shopping campaign, which is a campaign type that was only around for a few years. 

Basically, all a Smart Shopping campaign did was combine Standard Shopping and Dynamic Display Remarketing into one campaign, because those are the two most common types of campaigns ecommerce advertisers ran.

When PMax launched, after about nine months, Google deprecated (got rid of) Smart Shopping and “upgraded,” putting air quotes around upgraded, “upgraded” all Smart Shopping campaigns to PMax.

So, if you want to recreate Smart Shopping, just launch a Standard Shopping campaign and a Dynamic Display Remarketing campaign. 

If you're going to launch PMax, give the thing some assets and launch PMax.

That's just my opinion. If you run a feed-only PMax and it's working well for you, I am very happy for you and by all means keep enjoying those great business results.

By the way, this is a lot of information for you to take in on the go. You can sign up for the Inside Google Ads newsletter for free on my website, and this isn't a typical newsletter. All that means is you're going to get the transcript of each episode delivered to your inbox every week on Thursdays.

So, if you want to get this transcript and future transcripts delivered to your inbox, you can sign up on my website, the link is in the episode description.

Our final question comes from Writing4you on TikTok and they ask, would you recommend Performance Max or Search for B2B service agencies?

My short answer is Search. 

Let me give you the medium answer. Search tends to be more effective than Performance Max for, I'll call it lead gen businesses, so whether that's a service-based business, a B2B business, with most of those kinds of businesses, your goal is lead gen. It's not online purchases. Someone fills out a form, calls you, books a demo, etc. 

So, I find that Search works better for that because of conversion tracking and this is what we talked about in the last episode, episode four, so you can go listen to that one if you missed it. 

PMax can only work well for lead gen if you have full funnel conversion tracking, which is called OCT (Offline Conversion Tracking) or OCI (Offline Conversion Import). They're the same thing. 

So, when people like me say PMax doesn't work well for lead gen, it's not that PMax itself doesn't work. It's because most lead gen accounts don't have that full funnel conversion tracking. So, what that means is people will come to your website from the PMax, they'll fill out your form and leave, and then you follow up with them, etc.

And so, PMax can get really, really good at getting people to fill out your form, because that's all it's set up to do. But it can tend to go after audiences who maybe are not your ideal customer, and they're going to fill out your form and bring you a bunch of leads that may be spam because of Display inventory, but even if they're not spam, just not as high quality as you need.

The way that OCT or OCI fixes that is where you connect your CRM, your customer database, back to Google Ads. And so you let Google Ads know, hey, this lead right here, that was not a customer. You don't get to count that as a conversion. And this lead here did not turn into a customer, so don't count that as a conversion. But this lead here did turn into a customer, and that customer spent $1,200, so now you get full credit for that.

So, it's after the fact editing that conversion data letting Google know it worked. And if you have that set up, which the vast majority businesses do not, because it's complicated, but if you have that set up, then yes, Performance Max can work well for lead gen, whether that's B2B, services, whatever

It might be. 

But given that 99% of the Google Ads accounts I've seen since leaving Google, aka the Google Ads accounts with small to medium-sized budgets, do not have Offline Conversion Tracking, I recommend Search for you. 

Running a Search campaign means you get to really control your keywords. You can do exact match, as exact as you can these days. 

You can select audiences and limit your reach just to those specific audiences, whereas Performance Max only gives you an audience signal. 

And Search is really designed to capture demand. Performance Max will capture demand, but it's also going to try to do some Demand Creation via Demand Gen and Video.

So, to summarize, would I recommend Performance Max or Search for B2B service agencies, and if I can expand that, for lead gen businesses? If you have full funnel conversion tracking, then I'd recommend Performance Max. But if you do not, I recommend sticking with Search.

So, should you run Performance Max campaigns? If you have sufficient budget, accurate conversion tracking, and your existing Google Ads campaigns are meeting your goals then yes, go for it. If not, stick to the classic campaign types for now, like Search and Shopping, until you get your results to a place you want them in order to scale and grow.

To stay up to date on all the latest Google Ads changes, tips, tricks, you can look no further than my membership course, which is conveniently also called Inside Google Ads. With my course Inside Google Ads, there are no hacks, no tricks, no cheating the system, just practical, easy to digest lessons. It's all about how to work with, not against the platform to get the best out of it. You can learn more about Inside Google Ads, the course at learn.jyll.ca, that's J-Y-L-L.ca, or click the link in this episode description.

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

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