Inside Google Ads podcast: Episode 99 - PMax vs Shopping

Performance Max, Standard Shopping, or a Search campaign? What should you choose for your e-commerce business?

These are the questions you've been asking and I'm here to give you the answers right now. 

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 99, PMax vs Shopping.

Our first question comes from an anonymous TikTok user and they say, PMax or Shopping for my online store?

I usually recommend starting with Standard Shopping first and here’s why. By having a Standard Shopping campaign, you'll be able to see if your conversion tracking is working. You'll be able to see if your Merchant Center feed is set up correctly and optimized and matching to the kinds of searches you want.

You can start with a much smaller budget than going for PMax, and you can start with the Maximize Clicks strategy to just get your ad showing up on Google, and get people to your website before hopefully getting enough purchases to move to Target ROAS.

Micro-conversions could also be really helpful to you here. I recommend checking out Episode 39 of this podcast if that's a new concept for you.

On the other hand, PMax may be a good choice for you if you're ready to scale and grow. For example, you're running Standard Shopping, it's performing well, but your Search Impression Share is getting high and you want more.

PMax can also be a good choice when you have sufficient conversion volume. I'd say once you're getting about three to five sales per day on average from the campaign, then that's plenty enough conversion data for PMax to be able to build on and expand into other channels and placements.

PMax can also be a good choice if you want to supplement your Shopping ads with Display, Video, Demand Gen, and more image and video based assets. Note that just because you're running a Performance Max campaign and you add assets to it, doesn't mean they're actually gonna serve, but they'll get a chance to and if they perform well, then Google will put more of your budget there.

Remember, Standard Shopping and Performance Max campaigns are actually more similar than you'd think. They both offer a Search Terms report and the ability to add negatives. They give you audience insights from the insights tab. They give you product level reporting and PMax gives you asset performance and channel performance as well. So transparency is pretty similar whether you choose PMax or Shopping. And they also offer similar levels of control, or lack thereof, because whether it's Shopping or PMax, you don't get to pick your keywords. They both use keywordless technology.

So long story short, if you are just getting started and or you have a budget of less than $50 a day, Standard Shopping is the right choice. If you're looking to scale or if you're a more experienced business that happens to just be new to Google Ads right now, then PMax may be the better choice for you.

Before we get to our next question, this is Episode 99 of the weekly Inside Google Ads podcast. Whether this is your first episode or your 99th episode, I would appreciate it if you could leave Inside Google Ads a review.

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Thank you for your support for the last 99 weeks. I'm looking forward to at least 99 more with you!

Our next question comes from Sam on YouTube, and they say, which campaign type is better for an e-commerce product, Google Search or Google Shopping, and why? 

So in question one, we compared Shopping to PMax. Now let's compare Shopping to Search, because it's a bit of a different calculation.

I will still usually recommend starting with Standard Shopping. 

1. Firstly, you just get better visibility for your products with an image, pricing, any promotions or other annotations around things like shipping or reviews. 

2. Also, Shopping results are often higher up on the search engine results page than Search ads. 

3. Shopping ads are eligible for AI overviews, whereas with Search, you're only eligible if you're using Broad match or AI Max. 

4. Shopping campaigns offer an opportunity to use and optimize your Merchant Center feed, which can also help with your organic visibility too.

5. And probably my favorite thing about a Shopping ad is people can see the key points about your product right there. And if it's not what they're looking for, then they won't click. 

For example, if you offer a luxury product and so you have an extra zero on your price, people may not know that from a search ad, but they'll know it from a Shopping ad, so you won't waste money on them. 

Or maybe you only offer something in a large package and someone's looking for an individual. They'll see that right away from your Shopping ad and be less likely to click. Whereas on Search, they may not realize that until they get to your landing page. So you can actually end up disqualifying the people you don't want much easier in Shopping than in Search. 

However, Search does have some benefits over Shopping. 

1. The main one being you can pick your keywords. You can use Exact match if you want. Whereas in Shopping, it's all dynamic query targeting, AKA keywordless targeting, based on your feed. 

2. In Search, you can also write your ad text. You have your headlines, descriptions, and dozens of different assets. Whereas in Shopping, it's just your title, picture, and information from Merchant Center. 

3. Another big benefit to Search is you can start with Maximize Conversions bidding. In Shopping, your only options are Manual CPC (no thanks), Maximize Clicks (okay), and then Target ROAS. And it can be hard to get enough conversion data for Target ROAS. 

In spite of those benefits of Search though, I still do recommend if you're putting your first $20 a day for your e-commerce product into Google Ads, starting with Shopping rather than Search. Remember, you don't have to advertise every single product all at once. You can start with just five to 10 products. And don't be afraid to potentially layer audiences into your Shopping or Search campaigns.

By the way, if Google Merchant Center is something that intimidates you, freaks you out, or you've just never looked at before, you have to check out my one-hour Google Merchant Center Masterclass with guest expert Casey Gill. It's included for my Inside Google Ads course members, along with more than 100 in-platform tutorials, a monthly one-hour live video call with me and your fellow members, in-depth training on Search, PMax, Shopping, audiences, bidding, and more.

You can join Inside Google Ads today at learn.jyll.ca, that's J-Y-L-L dot C-A, or follow the link in the episode description.

Our final question comes from Arifurpro on YouTube and they say, is it okay to run Search, Shopping and Performance Max campaigns for the same product?

While you are allowed to do this, there's no restrictions or anything against it, I don't recommend duplicating the same product in Search and PMax or in Shopping and PMax. Here's why.

Remember that only one ad from your Google Ads account can move forward to compete in the auction when a user searches. So if multiple campaigns are eligible to serve an ad for the same search or the same product, only one campaign will win that internal audition to proceed. 

So for Search, for example, if you want to advertise when someone is searching for “blue hoodie” and you have a Search campaign that could place a Search ad and a PMax campaign that could place the same Search ad, only one of them will move forward. And so over time, that “blue hoodie” search will likely get split across Search and PMax, which means you're having to learn two times over how that query performs for you and what are the millions of signals that suggest Smart Bidding should go all in and try to get that user.

And the same principle applies for Shopping. Let's say you have a blue hoodie in your Shopping feed. It's running in Shopping and it's running in PMax. There's probably hundreds of different queries that could match to that product, but you can only show an ad for that product one at a time. Either PMax is gonna win it or Shopping is gonna win it each and every time. So while one advertiser can advertise multiple products at a time on a SERP - for example, if you have four different blue hoodies, then you could show all four different blue hoodies - each one of those products can only be shown from PMax or from Shopping. 

So again, if they're both competing, because they could both advertise the same product, one's going to win some of the time, one's going to win the rest of the time, and all of that learning and knowledge and automation that the AI needs is going to be split, which means you're going to have to learn the same thing two times over. That wastes budget, it wastes time. It's just not the most efficient way to set up your account or to use your ads investment.

What can you do?

If you're running Shopping and PMax, I recommend filtering products so that the same product is not being duplicated across both campaigns.

And if you're running Search and PMax, I recommend reviewing the Search Term reports and ensuring that you don't have a ton of duplication. Some is inevitable, but for example, if you see a lot of brand queries showing up in Search and in PMax, decide which one gets your brand, which one doesn't and then use brand inclusions and exclusions, or negative keywords if you need to, to make that happen.

To wrap things up today, here's a quick summary of three key things to decide which is better for your online store: Shopping versus Search versus PMax.

1. First is objective and stage. If you're just starting out, probably choose Standard Shopping. If you're trying to scale and reach all of Google's inventory, use PMax. And if your objective is very specific demand capture or you need really precise keyword control, choose Search.

2. Second is budget. If you're planning to spend less than $50 a day, choose Search or Shopping, not PMax.

3. Third is data foundation. If you're not sure if your conversion tracking is set up correctly or you're just getting started with your conversion tracking, definitely choose Search or Shopping first. Do not go straight to PMax. And if your Merchant Center feed is brand new, you've never used it for advertising before, definitely choose Shopping before potentially transitioning into PMax. If you have a weak foundation in your account, PMax is going to make that worse, not better.

Today's Insider Challenge is this. Let's say you're auditing an account and you notice a lot of overlap between the Shopping and PMax campaigns, overlapping products, overlapping Search terms. What do you do? And how do you determine your recommendation? 

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.

Last Episode's challenge, Episode 98, was this. Let's say you've just taken on a new client and they say they want to build brand awareness. So you build the Google Ads strategy accordingly. And then at your first monthly check-in, the client is not happy because the CPCs are higher than they expected. How do you respond? 

The first step I recommend is to validate the client even if you don't agree with them. Acknowledge that CPCs are high, right? Even though that's not the objective and that's not what we're trying to do here, just acknowledge that their truth is true.

Or if it's not true, you've got to correct that right away.

But assuming it is, acknowledge that CPCs here are high. However, our stated goal is awareness. So we're measuring success based on impressions, reach, views, whatever you've chosen, not by clicks or CPCs.

Here's a helpful way I like to explain. When we're optimizing for impressions, let's say our bid strategy, our campaign is just trying to get impressions. That's all it sees. Clicks are an accident. The campaign isn't trying to get clicks. The bid strategy can't even see if clicks are happening or not or what they cost. We're optimizing for impressions. We're being billed for impressions. So we're paying for impressions. Clicks are not even part of the equation.

Once we've now clarified and validated, I'd want to move forward to solutions. Do we still want to measure success by impressions, unique reach, views or whatever awareness metric we're using? Or do we now want to actually change our success metric to something else like clicks or CPC or maybe conversions or ROAS or CPA? And if we are changing how we measure success, that could mean a completely different strategy. Maybe right now we are using a Video campaign, but if suddenly the goal is ROAS, you can bet we're not gonna be running video anymore.

If we do want to stay the course and remain focused on awareness, not clicks, then I would wrap up by reiterating what the goals are. Is it CPM? What's the CPM goal and are we achieving it? Or is it a volume goal, like to reach a hundred thousand unique users by the end of the month? Are we on track to do that? 

Lastly, make sure we end this meeting all on the same page about what happens next. 

What do you think? Would you say the same or something different?

I'm Jyll Saskin Gales, and I'll see you next time for Episode 100 of Inside Google Ads.