In this episode of the eCommerce Evolution Podcast, I sit down with Savannah Knight, one of OMG Commerce's top Google Ads specialists, to discuss the often divisive topic of Performance Max. Savannah shares her secrets to success and busts common myths surrounding this powerful campaign type, helping listeners turn their "meh" campaigns into true profit drivers.
Key topics and lessons covered in this episode:
- Understanding the traffic composition of your Performance Max campaigns is crucial for making informed optimization decisions.
- Utilizing best-performing creative assets and proper segmentation can significantly impact the success of your campaigns.
- Savannah shares real-world success stories and the strategies behind them, including how to effectively use Performance Max for new customer acquisition.
- Common mistakes to avoid when setting up and optimizing Performance Max campaigns, such as the "set it and forget it" approach and improper asset matching.
- Exciting upcoming features for Performance Max, like asset-level performance insights and the "Bid for Profits" option, and how they can revolutionize your Google Ads strategy.
Whether you're a Performance Max pro or just getting started, this episode is packed with actionable insights and expert advice to help you take your campaigns to the next level.
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Chapters
(00:00) Introduction
(04:07) Why Are People Frustrated With Performance Max?
(06:16) PMAX Success Stories
(07:38) The Importance of Good Creative
(10:58) Using PMAX For New Customer Acquisition
(18:32) Using PMAX For Branded Search
(22:53) How Does PMAX Fit In With Your Other Campaigns?
(29:58) Common PMAX Mistakes
(38:47) Conclusion
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Show Notes
- Exclusive In-Person Holiday Event in LA
- Savannah Knight (LinkedIn)
- Mike Rhodes (LinkedIn)
- Mike Rhodes latest PMax Script
- Moiz Ali (LinkedIn)
- Google Marketing Live 2024 Summary
- Boom Beauty
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Connect With Brett
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce
- Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/
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Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more.
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Other episodes you might enjoy:
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Transcript
Savannah:
The other thing goes back to getting Performance Max to focus on new customers. It seems so simple, but the bid strategy itself that you're utilizing will kind of determine where your placements are.
Brett:
Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the e-commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today we're talking about Performance Max, Google's flagship campaign type. It's a campaign type that really is a bit divisive. Some people love it, some people hate it, some people love to hate it. And so today we're going to be busting some myths and talking about how to make this campaign type profitable and incremental and worthwhile for your brand. And so what I wanted to do is bring on one of our top OMG commerce experts. Certainly I have experience in p max, but not like my guest today. And so I'm delighted to welcome to the show Savannah Knight. Savannah's been with OMG for over four, going on five years as a specialist. She's consistently one of our rockstar specialists. She's got a couple of internal records scaling YouTube campaigns with the lowest CPA. She's got some of the most successful performance Max campaigns that we've ever run as an agency. And so with that intro, Savannah, welcome to the show and how's it going?
Savannah:
Thank you, Brett. Going pretty good. Pretty good. Excited to be
Brett:
Here. Yeah. Yeah. This is also where you can throw in first time, long time type of thing. First time caller, long time listener. I don't know if that's actually true though.
Savannah:
This I try to listen to most of the podcast episodes you put out.
Brett:
Nice. Okay, great. Now, is this the first time you've been on or did you come on a panel one time? I think on the podcast.
Savannah:
This is the first podcast. Yeah, done some webinars. Wow. First timer,
Brett:
Maiden voyage. You've done speaking panels at Google. So we've done a number of events at the YouTube offices. You've done that before. We've done panels for the overall OMG commerce team. I know you've done several other things, but first time on the podcast, it's exciting times for short. So going to dive into pax, and as I mentioned, it's kind of divisive. A lot of people are actually frustrated with Performance Max. I know both D two C brands that are like, Hey, can we just go back to smart shopping? I know other agencies that kind of hate it. There's just been quite a bit of, it's just a divisive topic. And so what we found though is that for a lot of our accounts, performance Max is the top performing campaign type. However, you can't just turn it on and let it do its thing because there's some sneaky features.
There's some things under the surface with Performance Max that make it not a set it and forget it type of campaign, even though that's kind of what Google wants it to be. So a few things to watch out. For one, it will lean into brand and the idea behind Performance Max is it's going to find easy conversions. It's going to lean into those. And so brand is kind of the first place that it often starts, but that does not often add to true incremental new customer acquisition. And so that's something to watch out for. And so I think it's also one of those things where there's just not a lot of transparency. So seven channels rolled into one and people want more transparency, more control. We're kind of control freaks as agencies and as marketing experts. And so we'd a little more transparency. Some of that is coming, just came back from Google Marketing Live.
There's going to be some changes coming to Performance Max, which I think everyone will welcome. And then I think in some ways there's just a lack of trust in Google right now because of a few things in the news. And so we want to help you turn this from a meh campaign into a max campaign. That's what I heard someone say on online recently. As they say, it's more like performance meh instead of Performance Max. So we're going to help you dial it up a little bit, but from your perspective, Savannah, and maybe I touched on a lot of it, but why are people frustrated with Performance Max?
Savannah:
Yeah, I think the lack of visibility is one of the biggest things. So you don't know what's driving the performance, so it's hard to know what to invest in. So a video is working, you want to create more video. You can't tell in Performance Max if that's what's working the best or not. Also having lack of controls. So if you see, hey, maybe desktop is working really well, you can't make those bid adjustments to invest a little bit more into those areas. So not being able to control those kinds of things, no placement exclusions, that kind of things. And then the visibility that we do have, they're not always actionable insights. You can see, hey, this audience is working, but what can we really do with
Brett:
That? And what's really interesting, I was on a call with a large client recently and they said something really well that I think is worth repeating. The worst thing that can happen with a campaign is not that it fails whether a campaign succeeds or fails. That's not the worst thing. The worst thing is if it succeeds or fails and you don't know why. If you don't learn from it, if you can't say, okay, this is what worked and we know why. And so now we're going to duplicate that where this is what didn't work and here's our hypothesis to why. So what we're going to test next, both of those are valuable, finding what works or what didn't and understanding why sometimes the performance Max, especially right off the shelf, does not give you those insights and you need those. And so there's a few ways we can get into the weeds a little bit with Performance Max and uncover what's actually going on inside of the campaigns.
And then we can make adjustments. But yeah, natively it doesn't always provide the insights that we need. So I think to maybe set the stage because we do Performance Max if it's done properly, because we think it can scale and there's a lot of good things there. Also, Google's not going to reverse the clock. I think we can just, if anybody is hoping, Hey, let's just go back to the standard shopping days, I don't think it's going to happen. This is where Google is headed. They want more campaign types, performance Max as indicated by the launch of demand gen campaigns. So what are your favorite Max success stories, Savannah, without mentioning client names and whatnot, what are some of your favorite success stories?
Savannah:
One of my recent successes is with a jewelry client. We spent the last year or so just testing new messaging, new ad copy, getting better with images. They just really leveled up when it came to creative. And so over the last year we did tons of testing and comparing Q1 of this year to Q1 of last year, click-through rates were up about 40%. So that's one of my favorites. Just knowing that creative really does matter when it comes to p max. And then of course another one, I think we've mentioned this one before, back in the early days of max scaling to about 10,000 per day with a lawn care company with brand exclusions in place. So all that coming from new customers, I think that's one of my favorite
Brett:
Ones. That was one of the great ones. And what's really cool about that, and we'll talk about this more later, but that specific campaign leaned in pretty heavily to YouTube. So it was scaling to 10 KA day and beyond, and a large percentage of that traffic was from YouTube. And there's some specific reasons why there. And so we'll kind of dive into that as we go. But what you said about the jewelry client, brilliant, and I want to dive into that a little bit. So let's talk creative for a minute. I think the way a lot of brands approach Performance Max, and I think the way a lot of agencies approach Performance Max is they put a ton of time and creativity and brain power and human capital into good creatives for Meta because that's maybe where they're spending the most money. But then with Performance Max or with Google, they treat it search or just table stakes.
And so they throw creative assets at it and then never look again. And what is really important to understand is that you have to give Google your best. So Met Creatives, met Results. So thinking about what are my top performing image assets? What are my top performing video assets as I put them into Performance Max, am I watching performance and then dropping the losers and adding more potential winners for testing? Am I thinking about headlines and descriptions both for search but also for display and remarketing? Because again, that's another one where we audit hundreds of accounts every year and we look at sometimes, man, these headlines are boring, and these descriptions do not differentiate your product or your brand in the least. And so if you give Google Underpowered assets, the algorithm can only do so much. And so this is something we talk about a lot with our clients and we try to gain learnings frequently from images and things like that and then we can test it. But what is your approach to creative testing and how do you talk about creative assets inside of Performance Max with our clients? Yeah,
Savannah:
So I think Performance Max isn't the best place necessarily to start creative testing just because there isn't that visibility into those creative insights, see what's working. So whenever we start with Performance Max, I like to give it assets that we already know work really well, so we can kind of create that baseline and then from there we can start testing additional creatives.
Brett:
One quick note on that, Savannah, which is really important is right now basically as you upload assets or put assets into Performance Max, you can kind of see what's the best performing, what's good, what's average, what's below average, things like that kind of general stuff, but no specific metrics tied to assets, but that is coming so soon we'll be able to see performance at the asset level, which will unlock a new level of learning and then the ability to tweak and adjust and maximize.
Savannah:
Yeah, absolutely. Really, really excited to get a few more of those insights for
Brett:
Sure. So yeah, I kind of cut you off iStream there. So starting with the best performing assets, don't start with stuff that you don't have any idea if it's going to work. Start with the best and then what do you do from there?
Savannah:
Yeah, I think it's really important to give it every type of asset as well. After all its purpose is to go right place, right time. If you don't have all the creative to be eligible for all the different ad inventory, it can't accomplish what it was set out to do. So making sure you have all the aspect ratios, landscape, vertical, portrait images, giving it at least one of everything is really important as well.
Brett:
And I think that is important because the campaign type does want all the assets and certainly there are some interesting things we can do going feed only or starving the campaign of certain assets to try to push it one way or the other. It's a little more advanced strategies. We can maybe talk about that later, but I think in general that makes sense. Now let's talk a little bit about using Performance Max for new customer acquisition. I think this is one of the areas where people get frustrated with Google and Performance Max in general from the lens of, Hey, is this really incremental or is this just leaning into brand? So how do you look at Max from a new customer acquisition standpoint? And then let's get into some of the strategies and tactics we use to get the campaigns to lean more into new customer acquisition. Yeah,
Savannah:
PAXs can be a great avenue for new customer acquisition just because there are so many different options as far as settings go to make it lean into those new customers. So I know a lot of people are saying it just really focuses on brand and remarketing, but I think that's just if you have it set up incorrectly or just kind of do that, set it and forget it approach. Totally. So if you wanted to lean into new customers, I think the first thing is going to be the brand exclusions. So basically you just create a brand list and it looks at your website and it says, okay, we're not going to show up for any of these searches. Excuse. So for a haircare client that I have recently, we added in the brand exclusions and we saw using the script from Mikes, always shout out to Mikes for that. We were able to see in the search terms report for P max, about 36% of our clicks for that campaign were from branded searches After we added the brand exclusions, we see about 2% are from branded searches, so it's not completely excluding them, but we'll take 2%
Brett:
For sure. Close enough, close enough, absolutely. So let's actually pause a second and let's talk about that Mike Rhodes script because this is something that is a little more advanced or there's a free version, there's a paid version, but this script that our buddy Mike Rhodes created and shout out to Mike Rhodes, longtime friend. He and I spoke at Traffic and Conversion Summit way back in the day. We both talked about Google Shopping at the same event. We're like, Hey, we should maybe be friends. And so then been in touch with him ever since I was 16 something, but now he's got a script that runs for Performance Max to pull out some insights. But what does that script do for us?
Savannah:
So there are actually two, there's one script where it looks it can pull the spend from the different channels so we can see how much of our spend on Performance Max is actually going to display, how much is going to shopping, how much is going to video, which has been huge to be able to see what's really working inside a performance max. The second script is a search terms report. So it'll look at the last 30 days, the searches that were driving performance. So we'll see impressions, clicks, conversions, conversion value and all of that.
Brett:
Yeah, I would really not want to run Performance Max without these scripts. I think it gives a layer of insight that you just don't get otherwise and you're sort of flying blind without these. And one of the mistakes, and I've actually written some LinkedIn posts that'll be coming soon on Performance Max, but I think one of the biggest mistakes that people make is they don't understand the traffic composition of Performance Max. So okay, I'm spending a hundred dollars a day or a thousand dollars a day or $5,000 a day on Performance Max, but where is that spend going? Is it mostly going to search, mostly going to shopping, mostly going to display or YouTube? Where is that going? And you need to see that once, what makes sense to change. If a campaign is leaning into 85% search, then changing headlines, descriptions, thinking about search terms is really, really important.
If it's leaning in mostly to shopping, then that's where maybe some feed optimizations would make sense, or if it's YouTube, then thinking about creative for YouTube makes a lot of sense. And so understanding traffic composition makes a big difference. And what's interesting is since Performance Max was kind of the next evolution of smart shopping, and since shopping is at the core, it's foundational for e-commerce brands, a lot of people treat Performance Max just like, Hey, this is my new standard or my new smart shopping. And that's not a bad way to look at it, except that some campaigns lean way more into search than you might think. And we noticed that with a couple of our brands once we started running the script is that, Hey, we thought these were 60% shopping, but they were actually 70% search. And so then you know what to tweak or adjust, and then maybe I should start another campaign and maybe I should do a feed only campaign to really push it to Google shopping or whatnot. And so getting that traffic composition and that traffic breakdown is critical. Without it, you really can't make good decisions. So then how else are you getting campaigns to lean into new customers? We can exclude brand, we can see what's happening with these scripts. What else are you doing to lean into new customers?
Savannah:
Yeah, so we've got the brand exclusions. The second big one is going to be the new customer features that they have on Performance Max. So there's a couple of different options. We can bid higher for new customers or we can bid only for new customers. So I'll kind of dive in without getting too nerdy about how those work. If we bid higher for new customers, basically we say every new customer is worth a hundred dollars more than a returning customer or whatever value that we decide to give it. So whenever a new customer converts, we're feeding the algorithms more conversion value data, so then it starts going after those new customers a lot more heavily. One thing to note with that it does artificially inflate overall conversion value. So you have to keep that in mind when we look at results. And then the second option is bidding only. And
Brett:
Actually I want to just talk about that just really quickly just to make sure this is clear. So remember when we first started testing this feature a few years ago and we're like, oh, this is smart. Yeah, I'm willing to pay an extra 50 bucks or an extra a hundred bucks maybe even for a new customer. But when you give that change to Google, you put that in the settings, I'm willing to pay an extra 50, extra a hundred. Google just adds that amount to the conversion value of that purchase, and that's all just inflated. It's to kind get the algorithm to work and to show to weight that conversion higher than another conversion. And I remember when I first saw it, I remember a conversation with Greg specifically, what is going on? This is ridiculous. So then you have to get the numbers right. Then you can no longer trust the conversion value column or even conversion value over cost ROAS column if you do this. So then you got to run some custom calculations to strip out that extra fee, which really just becomes kind of cumbersome. So in theory, it's good because you're saying, Hey, go after new customers more. Then it messes up some of your data. So it kind of creates a problem there, but so you don't have to do that route, you get another option. And what is that? Yeah,
Savannah:
I typically lean towards the second one, which is bidding only for new customers. So basically you have to go into the conversion section on the account, define what your current customers are, so giving it the best info that you have going to be your customer match lists. You can create some conversion based lists based on purchasers and things like that in the account. Then it will understand who those people are and then kind of exclude them from the account. It's not technically an exclusion, but it's kind of excluding them from that campaign.
Brett:
And we have found that as we apply the new customer only to Performance Max, it does a better job of leaning into finding new customers. It does not do a perfect job. There's still going to be some repeat customers that come through there, but it does a better job. It keeps your data clean as well when you go that route. So we in general like that a little bit better. Now, an important note to make here. So let's talk brand a little bit. So now we've got a Performance Max campaign that's excluding brand. It's potentially going after new customers only. But then what are we doing for brand? Because it's still important that we show up for our brand name. And I know this is a tricky topic. I remember our friend and longtime client, Moiz Ali said, Hey, this is a tax, right? This is the Google tax that they levy, but you got to show up for your brand name.
I think it's important to note that, hey, just because someone saw your ad on YouTube or Facebook or elsewhere, someone recommended a product, it does not mean they're 100% sold on your product. So I don't think it's the same thing if someone searches for Savannah's Skincare, which has a nice ring to it and then they've never bought from you before, that's not the same thing as someone typing in Nike sneakers. If someone types in Nike sneakers, they probably know they want Nike. So if Adidas sneak in there with an ad, not likely to purchase, but if I type in Savannah's Skincare and someone else pops up, and I don't really know Savannah Skincare other than maybe just one ad that I saw, but another ad sneaks in with a good offer and it looks similar and it looks attractive, like, hey, I'm going to it out. So can't disappear from brand because otherwise we will see sales go down almost certainly. But you also don't want to overpay otherwise you're just giving all your profits to Google. So if we've got brand solutions and Performance Max, we're going to do customer only. What are we doing to make sure we're getting the right brand traffic and not overpaying for it?
Savannah:
So my favorite setup is if brand exclusions are in place on Performance Max still utilize standard shopping to pick up all of those branded searches. So we actually did a test recently on one of my clients sells haircare products. We had a Performance Max campaign with brand exclusions and then tried Performance Max to pick up that branded traffic. But we actually saw when we utilized Standard Shopping, we had a lot more control over our CPCs, so efficiency was way higher with a branded standard shopping campaign.
Brett:
I love that so much. I think branded shopping or standard shopping where you're bidding for a really high row as you're not excluding brand that allows you to show up for branded terms because with anything that's product driven, so anything e-commerce, anything D two C, you search for Savannah Skincare, you search for car accessories or you search for haircare products, whatever you're searching for, almost certainly shopping results are going to show up there. And they're almost always more enticing and more interesting to click than just a search ad. And so if you have a branded search campaign, great, you should, but without having some kind of branded shopping exposure as well, you are going to lose clicks. And that's a really powerful place for a competitor to snipe your branded traffic. And so got to have a solution for that. And we totally think that standard shopping aimed at brand is the way to go. And then any insights on, I know this about Performance Max, but any insights on search on branded search campaigns?
Savannah:
So branded search, I think they're still super important, especially if you're doing a lot of top of funnel targeting. We see that if you have those brand exclusions in place, you can still use search of course, an exact match to still have control over your CPCs on branded search. But having the combo of branded search and branded shopping is super important because a lot of times we see at the top of the search results page, there's going to be that shopping carousel. So if you're not there and on branded search, you're going to see competitors winning out on your search results
Brett:
Page. Yeah, what's really interesting is that when a brand shows up in both places, so when you've got a listing or a position or multiple positions even better in that shopping carousel, and then you have a search ad as well, the click-through rate of both increases because there's just something about that, Hey, I'm seeing now your name in multiple places want to have just more odds of clicking on one of your listings. But two, I think there's a little bit of validation there I'm seeing in multiple places, and we all know that what happens when Click-through rate increases, Google generally rewards that generally they want to show your ads more if click-through rate is high. And so you want to lift that rate for sure there. So very cool. How do you see Performance Max fitting in with other campaign types? And maybe a way to frame this is what's the ideal campaign structure? I know that's a really huge question, but for D two C brand, what's the kind of account structure look like and how does Max fit in with other campaigns?
Savannah:
So I'm still utilizing every campaign type. So even though Performance Max has placements across the board, I still like to have a little bit of that control and have search display, demand gen, all of it we see with Search, I still like to have it segmented brand and non-brand. We are utilizing Broad Match. So the best media buyers, they love Broad Match already. So definitely recommend that Performance Max.
Brett:
That's a bold statement there. There may be an explosion of activity on Twitter. Do we love Broad Match? We really, and actually let's just double click on that really quickly. So broad match, I think there was a time and place when broad match was just terrible, right? Google is almost forcing us into that path to a certain degree, but I think there's some other things behind it that actually make it worthwhile from a testing standpoint at least, but also probably from a new customer acquisition standpoint. Why are you bullish on Broad Match right now?
Savannah:
There's a few reasons. So we see Google's rewarding people with Broad Match. So you're seeing lower CPCs with Broad match than say Exact. So it kind of flip flopped as it was in the past. But they also say, I think they said 15% of searches every day are new searches they've never seen before. So we just want to make sure we're eligible for all the different ways that people could be searching.
Brett:
And this is a stat that's been around forever, but it just has not changed where you have 15% of all search queries done on Google every day by browsers, by people is the brand new. Google's never seen them before. And so it's just one of those things where I think people are just inventing new ways to search. And as we get comfortable searching, we search in different ways and we search with our voice and things like that. And so you want to be eligible for that. And then I think one of the other important distinctions is because now Google knows so much about shoppers and because they can see your previous activity leading up to the search that you just conducted, they can bid up or down, Google can bid up or down based on how likely they think you are to convert with this more broad search term.
So it's the combination of search term or keyword, and then the person behind it and their behavior, they can kind of influence where Google's like, okay, this may be a broad search, generic search, but the person making the search, we believe in them. And one just quick example is if my 19-year-old daughter who's taken a class at college, if she searched for some kind of supplement doing a research paper or something, she's not going to buy it. And so Google maybe knowing that, Hey, I just did all these research searches likely for a paper for school or something. Now I search for a specific supplement, let's not even show an ad. Or if 44-year-old Brett Curry searches for the same supplement and I've got a history of buying a lot of supplements, which I do now want to show that ad. So same search term but different person behind it. I want to bid for one, I don't want to bid for the other. That's what Google is wanting to do and that's what the smart bid algorithm can do. And so another reason that to give broad match a try, but with caution, it could still get of bounds a little bit. So okay, went to broad match search for just a second, but what else? Back to the question of structure of a D two C account and how PAX fits in, you want to continue down that path?
Savannah:
Yeah, for sure. So still utilizing Display Demand Gen campaigns, like we said before, performance Max is a little bit harder to test creative if you don't already have a baseline. So still utilizing display for remarketing campaigns to test creative, test new images, test new messaging, and then demand gen. I'm starting to adopt a lot more demand gen, it's gotten quite a bit better over the past few months. So definitely, definitely utilizing Demand Gen as well. Great for top of funnel Android marketing there. And then with YouTube performance Max, it does have a lot of YouTube placements, but it's not going to go after YouTube like a YouTube campaign on its own will. So still having all the different campaign types is important.
Brett:
And it's something that Google recommends too. Google still recommends like, Hey have specific campaigns for these channels. And at Google Marketing Live recently, they even talked about what they call the power pair, which is just Performance Max and search running together that in accounts where Performance Max and search campaigns exist, then both of them perform better and we've seen that as well. And so yeah, having specific demand gen specific YouTube specific search, maybe standard shopping for brand and stuff like that, all of that actually helps Performance Max work a little bit better. And I heard, actually, I think you were at the same event as me at the YouTube offices in LA where a product specialist was talking and she kind of used the analogy that Performance Max is sort of like the mortar. So you've got Bricks, which would be some of your other campaigns, and then PAX is kind of designed to go in and fill in the cracks.
Now I really like that analogy from one perspective, but from the other side I'm like, well, performance Max should be a brick too. If it's mostly Google shopping, like Google shopping is a brick, it's foundational for D two C brands. But I think what she meant there is as other campaigns kind of inform the algorithm, and Google gets a really nice picture of who your ideal customer is, performance Max should lean into opportunities you're missing. And that's what I believe. We saw Savannah with that outdoor products brand where they had YouTube rocking. YouTube was spending multiple six figures a month, really great ads. And so then we had Performance Max though with some of the same assets and it was leaning into YouTube well also and profitably. And I believe as we broke it down and looked at it, max was just finding opportunities we were missing in the other campaigns. So the other campaigns informed Google on who your buyer is, performance Max leans into missed opportunities. And that's in general the way it works with other campaign types. You have a really well built out search campaign structure, it's still going to get some of the traffic performance. Max isn't going to steal all of your search traffic, but having these other campaigns helps inform performance Max nicely. Anything you would add to that or any specific call outs like on Demand Gen or some of the other campaign types?
Savannah:
I kind of view Performance Max as I think two ways. It helps to pick up some of the traffic that you've, with Demand Gen and YouTube we're growing top of funnel growing awareness and performance Max kind of helps to close the deal for a lot of those sales. So we're driving that traffic performance Max is closing the deal. And then again, like you just said, it's kind of picking up where we're missing out so we can have great YouTube set up, but then maybe Max see some opportunities where with audiences we're not necessarily bidding on and it knows the right time, the right placements, all of that. So it's kind of closing the gap.
Brett:
Awesome. Let's talk about mistakes that we see people make. So you take over accounts and you're known for taking accounts and really ratcheting up performance and creating some pretty dramatic turnarounds and improvements. But what are some of the mistakes you see that either other agencies make or that D two C brands make when it comes to Performance Max?
Savannah:
I think one of the biggest things we kind of mentioned it earlier is just treating it like a set it and forget it campaign, really not Performance Max does like to get comfortable. So if you don't shake it up, don't consistently add new assets, change up your images, your copy, that kind of thing. It will kind of get comfortable and it struggle to scale. So if you set it and forget it, it is going to start going after just that easy traffic and you won't be able to see its full potential. So I always recommend changing the images every now and then adding new search themes, testing some new audience signals, that kind of thing. Another big one I see a lot of people make the mistake with is I'm going to call it just paint splattering. They just throw everything at it. No strategy, just here's everything I got, which can work. But you want to make sure you're being really strategic with who do you want your ads to be in front of? Who are you trying to talk to? Are you using really good creative or are you just throwing a bunch of random stuff at it? I think that's a big mistake I see
Brett:
Too. Yeah, and a lot of that comes down then to proper segmentation. So we could have a whole podcast about when to consolidate campaigns, when to break apart campaigns for better targeting and things like that. But at a minimum, we need to segment our asset groups, which so it kind of functions like an ad group, but in P Maxs they're called asset groups where if you throw everything together, the algorithm's going to have a hard time really matching up the right creatives to what a user is looking for. And so to give an example, we worked for years and years with Boom by Cindy Joseph, shout out to their Firestone and team, but a few of their products, they have Boom Bright, which is mascara a wildly successful product. They also have some skin moisturizers, boom, silk boom, cotton top sellers, and then they have their boom stick.
But all of those are a little bit different. Now, you could have the same headline, same description, same images to sort of sell all three, but then you just have to lean into brand and overall brand proposition. But really to sell a product to sell mascara, I've got a different headline than I've got for BoomStick, right? BoomStick is like a makeup bag replacement, cotton and silk or moisturizers, mascara bright as mascara. And so you want to kind of segment your asset group, so that same image, same headline, same descriptions, same listing inside of your feed all sell the same product. And that kind of goes into, I'm just going to throw all this in here and just let Google sort it out. Now, if you have an asset group, you have a campaign that you want to lean into shopping traffic, it's okay to have it all together, right? Because then Google does know what to do with the feed only. And so yeah, I think it's kind of lazy segmentation or not thinking about how are we pairing our different asset groups or how are we structuring our campaigns makes a big difference as well. Any other mistakes you see? Either mistakes in running it, mistakes in optimizing it, any callouts there?
Savannah:
One thing that seems like it will be really simple, but I see a lot when we take over new accounts is they'll have, you think this campaign has these certain products in it, the images, all this stuff just because of the naming convention. But then if you go actually into the listing, we see different products. So the assets and the products just aren't matching up, which is such a simple mistake. But I see it time and time again when we take over new accounts. So absolutely check your listing groups, make sure it matches your copy, your images, all that.
Brett:
Yeah, really good call out because a lot of times and someone that doesn't work in Google ads all day, they don't exactly know what's click around and what to see. And so yeah, okay, this asset group is labeled mascara, this asset group is labeled shorts and this asset group is labeled socks. And so clearly that's what they are. But when you dig in and look a little bit closer, that's not what it is. And so then you're not getting the performance you think you're getting. And I think another thing to kind of keep in mind, I'm curious you if you have a thought on this, Savannah, from an optimization standpoint, I've also seen some campaigns and hey, we've seen some P max campaigns just crush results and get to 35,000, $50,000 a day and spend on performance max, new customer acquisition focus, things like that.
One thing I've noticed though is that there are a few different Google campaign types that will do this. Performance. Max I think is one of them that does this where let's say you're rocking along at a 300% row as that's your target ROAS bid is 300%. You're getting a good performance, but you're like, you know what? I can really live with a 200% return on ad spend because there's a halo effect and other things going on here. So then you lower it to 200% and it's like, okay, well now it's getting a 200 to 2 25 we're so good. But if you dig a little bit closer, the only thing that happened is that your ROAS dropped. You didn't get more conversions, you didn't get more clicks, really, all Google did was like, oh, sweet, I've got more to play with. I'm going to lean into display and some other things that just totally crap out on you.
And so I think that's something to look at too. I'm not saying you shouldn't lower your ROAS targets to bid more aggressively. I think in a lot of cases you can and should. Then it goes back to some of the earlier points made. You've got to look at the traffic breakdown. What did that do to our traffic composition? Because the last thing you want to do is just blindly look at ROAS and say, well, we're okay, we were at 300, but yeah, we're still okay with the 2 25, but you didn't get anything additional from that. You just gave more money to Google. And so being mindful of that, as we're getting more aggressive with our bids, where is that extra traffic coming from? How is it performing? And really just having a keen eye there. So I dunno if you have any callouts there or not and no worries if not.
Savannah:
Yeah, nothing specific. I think you covered that pretty well.
Brett:
Sweet. Okay, good. Any other mistakes that you see people make or any other points of education that you make related to Performance Max that kind of create an aha moment for clients that you talk to?
Savannah:
Yeah, I've got a couple. So one is that Performance Max is going to really favor some of your top products. So if you have a huge catalog, it's probably only going to serve maybe 10, maybe a hundred if you're lucky. And so you probably have a lot of products that aren't getting any ad serves at all. So again, this goes back to just throwing it all into one campaign that can really, you're not going to be showing your whole catalog. So going back to the segmentation too little segmentation means a lot of your products aren't going to be showing too much segmentation. On the other hand, you risk not getting enough data struggling to scale, but you want to find that sweet spot of segmenting so that way all of your products are getting visibility. That's a big one. I think Micros calls it zombie products, but yeah, just making sure we break those out so that way you can really take full advantage of performance Max. The other thing,
Brett:
Yeah, and I think just to talk about that just a little bit is it's sort of the 80 20 rule where 80% of the conversions in site of performance Max and specifically the shopping portion Performance Max are going to come from 20% of your products. But we've seen that it's even more exaggerated than that most of the time inside of Performance Max inside of shopping where it's maybe like the 90 10 rule or the 95 5 rule. And so then it's like, okay, we're only selling this handful of products inside of Performance Max, but we want to get the other one some visibility too. So how do we break out campaign structure to attempt to get more visibility there? So yeah, great call out and what else are you going to say?
Savannah:
Yeah, the other thing goes back to getting Performance Max to focus on new customers. It seems so simple, but the bid strategy itself that you're utilizing will kind of determine where your placements are. So if we use Target roas, it's going to really lean into search and shopping, but we found if you switch over to a Target CPA bid strategy, it's really going to go after more new customers. You're going to see more image-based placements, more video placements, which of course are better at converting new customers.
Brett:
Yeah, super interesting. Sometimes the bid strategy mixes things up a little bit too. Target ROAS is definitely more of a shopping type bid strategy or search. It just kind of always has been. Target CPA has always been what we've scaled YouTube campaigns with and display campaigns with in the past. And so sometimes even just making that change can get a campaign to lean into one channel versus another. So that's super interesting. Savannah, this has been amazing, your first podcast, absolutely crushing it. Any parting words of wisdom, any insights related to either Performance Max or anything Google ads related or anything you're excited about that you've heard is coming down the pike related to Google Ads and Performance
Savannah:
Max? So as a marketer, of course, getting more insight and visibility into Performance Max is really exciting to me. But I guess parting words is performance Max can be a great avenue for new customers. You just have to make sure that you're on top of you just stay on top of it, whether that be the settings, the creative. So if it's only leaning into brand and remarketing traffic, there's probably something going on. You need somebody to take a little bit closer look at it. I would say,
Brett:
Yeah, I love it. I think it really boils down to understand the composition of your performance Max campaigns, make sure you're using your best assets, your best creatives, look at getting proper segmentation, and then as you optimize, really watch performance and see how all of those other things, shift traffic composition, things like that, and just keep working because yeah, I'm with you. Performance Max can be awesome. It can also be a real drain. And so the key is in doing it the right way. I know for me, getting the insights that are coming and coming pretty soon is going to be exciting. The other thing I'm excited about is bid for profits. And this is something that we're beginning to test, and I believe it's still in beta. I'm not exactly sure, but it'll be coming soon this year. Where Target ROAS was awesome as that got built up, and I think this is the next level, the next layer for Google where we can attach COGS data to shopping feeds and then bid to maximize profits. And that's awesome because some products in our catalog may have wildly different margins or different structures there. And so ROAS really only tells part of the story. Getting the machine to lean into profits I think is going to be a huge win. So if you want to learn more about that, reach out to MG Commerce. Excited to test that as well. And so with that, Savannah, thank you so much for coming on and we'll have to do round two soon.
Savannah:
Absolutely. Thank you, Brad. It's been so much fun.
Brett:
Awesome. And hey, if you're listening to this and you're like, dang, I need someone like Savannah running my Google Ads account, I know that I'm not getting what I should be getting out of Performance Max, or search or shopping or YouTube, then reach out to MG Commerce. We're happy to one, to a complimentary audit for you, a strategic review for you if you're a qualifying D two C brand. Happy to check that out. Happy to talk strategy with you and with that, until next time, thank you for listening.
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