Inside Google Ads podcast: Episode 76 - PMax vs Search

Not sure how to choose between Performance Max and Search campaigns?

Let's break down the pros and cons of each Google Ads campaign type so you can figure out which one is most likely to drive the best results for your business.

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 76: Performance Max versus Search.

Now, before we get into the episode, usually I answer three of the burning questions you've asked me. But this month on Inside Google Ads, I'm actually taking a cue from YouTube. You see, YouTube is telling me which topics are most popular with my viewers. And I thought, hey, if this is what you'd like to hear about, why don't you hear about it from me?

So before we can compare Performance Max to Search, let's just make sure everyone's on the same page. What is a Search campaign in Google Ads? 

A Search campaign is what you probably think about when you hear Google Ads or AdWords. You, as an advertiser, tell Google the kinds of user searches you want to show ads on. Usually, you do that by entering keywords in your Google Ads account. And then when people search for things on Google, you have the opportunity to show them an ad.

With Search campaigns, you pick your average daily budget, what kind of bid strategy you want to use, your location targeting and keywords. You write your ads and set it live and get some search traffic.

Now, Performance Max campaigns work a little differently. This is a way for you to show ads across all the places that Google Ads enables that, such as Search, Display, Discovery, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, and more. So out of this single campaign type, you can show ads everywhere. 

The trade-off is that you don't actually get to choose where you show ads. You don't get to choose who you show ads to. You don't get to pick keywords or audiences. All you do is give Google your budget, bid strategy, and location targeting, just like Search. You provide it with a bunch of different assets, not just text ads, but also images and potentially video. And then Google's AI figures out where to show your ads, how to show your ads, whom to show your ads to, et cetera.

Now, unless you've been living under a rock, you know that AI is taking over in many industries. And of course, paid ads is no exception. Search campaigns are really how Google Ads used to work for the last two decades, and Performance Max is the vision for the future of Google Ads. Or not even the future, it's the present of Google Ads. In my opinion, your goal should be to get PMax working for you, because that means you're using the latest cutting edge AI powering your business. Who wouldn't want that? 

However, PMax campaigns are currently not the best fit for everyone. Let's explore some of their strengths and weaknesses.

The first strength of PMax is its simplicity. Not that it's simple to run, but if you do get it up and running and working for you, it's a lot easier to just manage one campaign than lots of different campaign types.

The second advantage is some unique placement opportunities. For example, there's a new feature in Google Ads called Video Ads Across Surfaces. Weird name, I know, but it basically means your Video ads can now potentially show on Search, in Shopping, in other places, but only if those video assets are in a Performance Max campaign. And as AI overviews and AI mode become more common, while Google hasn't confirmed this for sure, we can expect that the only way to get into this premium inventory is likely going to be via Performance Max.

This is because, potential weakness, you don't get to choose your targeting in Performance Max. You can give Performance Max optional Search themes to tell it the kinds of searches you want to show on, but you may or may not show on those Searches. And similarly, you can provide an audience signal to your Performance Max campaign to let it know the kinds of audiences you want to reach, but it may or may not reach those audiences.

The most important thing to the Performance Max campaign is achieving the objective as laid out in your bid strategy. So for example, if you tell it to Maximize Conversions, it's going to get you as many conversions as it can, which may or may not come from the signals you've provided.

The good news, though, is we get a lot more transparency in Performance Max now than we got a few years ago. So if anyone is telling you that Performance Max is still a black box that information is out of date. 

• We now have a full Search Terms Report in Performance Max, just like Search.

• We have channel reporting in Performance Max, so you know where your ad showed. 

• You get audience insights in Performance Max, so you understand the kind of audiences that are seeing your ads. 

• And we have full asset reporting, just like in other campaign types.

Let's compare and contrast that a bit now with the strengths and weaknesses of Search campaigns, and then we'll determine which one's right for you.

The biggest strength of a Search campaign over Performance Max is that you do actually get to pick your targeting to an extent via keywords or dynamic ad targets. You tell Google the kinds of searches you want to show ads on, but it's not as precise as you might think.

For example, if you use an Exact Match keyword, that used to mean that you only wanted to show an ad when the user’s search exactly matched your keyword. But now what that means is you can show an ad if the user’s search matches the intent or meaning of your keyword.

Practically what that means is a keyword [coffee cup] could match to searches for “latte tumbler,” “Yeti tumbler,” “coffee glass,” and on and on and on. Things that, sure, have a similar meaning, but may or may not be what you're actually trying to achieve.

And of course, if you're using Broad Match or you have AI Max turned on, then you're opening up essentially keywordless targeting, letting Google figure out, based on what keywords you do have and your website, what user searches it thinks might be most relevant for you. While the argument that Search gives you more control than Performance Max is still true, it's not as true as it used to be.

Of course, the strength of a Search campaign is that you can just show ads on Search. Often in a Performance Max campaign, if you set a really stringent bid strategy, it may spend 95% of your budget on Search anyway. But in a Search campaign, you can untick Search Partners, untick Display Network, and just advertise on Google Search, if that's what you want to do. You may potentially also see that as a weakness if you also want to run ads on YouTube, on Discovery, et cetera. You would need multiple campaign types to do that alongside your Search campaign, whereas Performance Max can do it all in one.

So which campaign type is right for you? Performance Max or Search?

Here are three rules to determine whether you should run Performance Max or a Search campaign. 

First is budget. If you have less than $50 a day to spend on your campaign, then I recommend you stick with Search. Why? Well, AI-powered Performance Max needs a lot of data to learn and at $50 a day, you're probably not getting a lot of data to learn. Don't get me wrong, $50 a day is plenty of money in the real world. But in the Google Ads world, that is a small budget that's better spent on Search.

Second is conversion tracking. You need full funnel conversion tracking in order for Performance Max to work effectively. What do I mean by that? If you're an e-commerce business, you need to be tracking purchases. And if you're a lead generation business, you cannot just track a phone call or a form fill and expect PMax to work. Because what will it do? It will find a ton of people who are really good at filling out forms, AKA bots, not necessarily customers. So you need to do some kind of offline conversion tracking to give Google Ads feedback and let it know which of those leads turned into customers (those can count as conversions) and which did not. If you don't have that in place, there are tools you can use like CallRail to do so, but if not, don't try Performance Max yet. Stick with Search until you have your conversion tracking in line.

Third is creative assets. I see quite a few people set up Performance Max campaigns. They fill out the headlines and descriptions, throw in some random images and call it a day. And you know what? Some random images are not going to be enticing to viewers. They're not going to perform well for you in this day and age. When you do that, you are essentially just creating a glorified Search campaign in Performance Max. If you truly want the cross-channel reach of Performance Max to work well for you, you need to give it some high-quality image assets and some high-quality video assets that have a chance at actually engaging your target audience, getting them to come to your website, learn more about your business and buy from you.

So if you're spending at least $50 a day, you have full funnel conversion tracking and some strong image and video creative, then go ahead and launch a Performance Max campaign. If not, stick with Search until you have those building blocks in place.

By the way, I asked AI this question as well, “What should you choose: Search or Performance Max?” and the advice it gave was laughably bad. So I'm going to share that with you now along with some commentary to help illustrate why when you're dealing with something as complex as Google Ads, you should find a trusted expert, whether that's me or someone else, rather than just asking Gemini or ChatGPT. Okay, let's have a laugh.

Apparently, according to AI, “the use cases for Performance Max are brand awareness, broad audience reach, and rapid experimentation with different ad formats.” Yeah, good luck achieving any of those with PMax. 

And apparently, according to AI, “the ideal use cases for Search campaigns are high intent traffic.” I'll agree with that. “Specific keyword targeting,” as we spoke about, so-so on that, and “tight budget control.” For the record, budget control in Search and PMax works the same.

I first created my course, Inside Google Ads, in 2022 because at that time, a lot of people were telling me they couldn't find any reliable in-platform Google Ads training. You can see from this short example here, that need has only grown. That's why I'm proud to offer more than 100 up-to-date in-platform tutorials. Plus, you can get your burning questions answered by me at any time.

I hope you enjoyed the format of diving into one topic deeply today rather than our usual answering three burning questions. Don't worry, we will be coming back to that in a few episodes!

So if you have any questions at all, about anything we discussed today or anything about Google Ads at all, you can drop a comment if you're watching or listening on YouTube or Spotify, or if you're listening elsewhere, feel free to drop a comment on any of my social media on LinkedIn, Instagram, Threads, YouTube.

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