Why Your Performance Max Campaign Is Failing

Your Performance Max campaign spending but not scaling? 

This episode of the Google Ads Unleashed Podcast breaks down exactly why PMAX fails in so many ad accounts, and how to fix it. 

Host Jeremy walks through the most common PMAX mistakes: wrong goals, bad settings, brand leakage, weak creatives, and feeds that quietly kill performance. 

Get your free 30 minute strategy session with Jeremy here: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/

Scale your store with 1:1 coaching: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/1-2-1-coaching

Transcript

Does your ad account look somewhat like this? You've just launched your first Google Ads campaign. It's usually a PMAX campaign. You maybe have several products or maybe it's just the one product and it's just spending and nothing is happening. Very often, this might even be your freelancer or agency doing this and Pmax is not working or working to a certain degree and then suddenly when you try to spend more, it falls off a cliff. If this is you, then you need to listen to this episode. And welcome back to Google Ads Unleashed. Hope everyone is doing absolutely fabulously this Monday. And today I want to cover something that I've actually not really spoken about so far, and that is how we attack the classic miss setup of Pmax. So let's talk bit about why this can happen. So, typically when you sort of uh set up your first Google Ads account or when even when you've had it running for a while or if you have a freelancer or an agency that maybe is not that good, which does happen. There's of course lots of good ones out there too, but this does happen. It seems and also by Google suggests this very often. So, Google themselves, it seems very often that Pmax is just the one campaign to fix it all patch that they slap on the big wound that is your bleeding media buying. They think that just creating one pmax and everything will be fine is enough to um yeah just to to to fix all of your vows and to um cover all of your media buying needs within the Google Ads universe. And I think that's completely wrong and foundationally wrong. And I I'm not hating on PMAX. When it came out, it was bit of a black box and bit of an odd product in my opinion. But now I think it is just as much a tool as it is uh any as like any other campaign type such as demand gen, search, uh display, etc., etc., and shopping. And I feel really that it gets a bit of a bad rap. It works really well in a lot of accounts that we run. We use it in almost every account. However, it has it pitfalls and there's a lot that you can do wrong. In this episode, I'm going to talk about the common wrong things that people do wrong when it comes to using Pmax campaigns. And the first one is to use it for the wrong purposes, I would say. So, typically we want to first look at what Pmax actually is. So, the performance max campaign evolved from something that used to be called smart shopping and before that there was only shopping campaigns and shopping campaigns of course still exist. list. Okay, so they they are still there. That is the uh campaigns that are responsible for showing your merchant center product listings at the top of Google as everyone knows. And that uh I think it was about 2017 or 18 I believe um evolved into something that uh then was called smart shopping which doesn't exist anymore. And a smart shopping campaign was sort of one of Google's first big excursions into the automation sphere. Um, and at the time there was already, I remember when it came out, we were all like, "We're going to lose our jobs. Automated bidding is going to take over and um, everyone's just going to run a PMAX uh, sorry, a smart shopping campaign and everything will run on its own." And of course, that's absolutely not the case. But uh, yeah, that that is what happened at the time. And what smart shopping introduced was an element of dynamic remarketing. So this is what we typically now know as an empty asset group or naked PMAX, right? uh you basically had your normal shopping ads of which the absolute majority of the ad spend was consolidated on and a certain element of dynamic remarketing which worked really really well. Okay. Uh Pax evolved from smart shopping and basically killed off smart shopping with the element that you could now instead of just having like ad groups have asset groups and those asset groups contain your product listings have the element of dynamic marketing as well. Uh but you could also mix it up with um sort of AIdriven or uh automation driven uh search and display ads, right? So it's sort of an all-in-one solution for the angle that you're trying to advertise for. So one thing that a lot of people get wrong is that they're trying to use Pmax for lead genen, right? So if you're using it for lead generation, it typically doesn't work as well as search. The reason that is is that Google when it comes to stuff like form submissions which you would typically track with lead genen will go for lowhanging fruits when it plays out pmax. Pax typically is a campaign that really really tries to favor the bottom funnel. Um uh so so so it it has its pitfalls in itself but basically what happens is that um if you have let's say for instance you track um elite form submissions Um it may uh play out a lot on the display network in very dodgy placements where bots crawl your page and your site etc. and it'll just um provide a lot of trash and spam leads. Okay. Um of course the exceptions uh there are exceptions to the rule. We do have some accounts. We have actually one account where we recently tried to turn off Pmax in there because it was lead gen and uh it turned out the volume of the inquiries dropped. dramatically and um- which which we didn't want and uh which we then reversed right so not every test is successful but basically our hypothesis failed there the quality of traffic didn't actually improve the quantity of traffic dropped um and we believe this is because and this is maybe too niche for this podcast but it's nice like mentioned it anyway we believe this actually happened because um the PMAX is not very good at covering several angles of how someone searches for your service or product. With this service, there's literally just one keyword you need to rank for, one and one only. And that's why we think that through um all of the different placements that Pmax offers in search and in display and discovery etc. The click costs were so dramatically lower and the also the conversion journey was a bit more complex with which the bit of remarketing actually worked pretty pretty well. Okay. Um so yeah, so that's kind of uh um uh Pmax. So typically it's a shopping campaign. So very often it doesn't work because you're trying to use it for something it's not designed for. Okay. So this is one thing where a lot of people go wrong. The second thing where I feel a lot a lot of people uh go wrong is that they are using simply the wrong settings. Because as so often with Google Ads, there's so much that you can do wrong, right? There's so many um issues that you can uh have by just having the wrong box ticked. Um and with Pmax, that is more than ever the the case. So, first things first, when you head through PMAX campaign, and I'm trying to do this off off the top of my head now, um very often you have something ticked that is called asset optimization. Okay? Um specifically, you will have your um PMAX more or less crawl your entire site map and basically play out DSA style campaigns and ads to more or less every every landing page of your uh website right with the assets that you provided and very often that does simply doesn't work well right DSA in itself is a great great campaign type please go and listen to the DSA um uh uh um podcast, there may actually be the chance that DSA disappears and it'll be asserted completely in PMAX. Those will be sad times, but we'll have to deal with that when and cross that bridge once we're there. Uh but I digress. But basically, very often uh especially you have a lot of products when you launch a PMAX, then suddenly a lot of spend goes into those DSA placements for that. You can actually very easily see if this is the case with you and if you're bleeding money if you head into um the sites and reports tab, users dimensions, campaign type, filter down and pmax and then uh have another dimension called landing page and you look at your usual KPIs over a longer period of time, spend, clicks, call um etc etc conversions and very often in those types of ad accounts when we audit it, we see a ton of spend on certain landing pages which never convert, right? So this t typically indicates uh of course products don't sell and they're not excluded. more importantly that um we have a lot of um spend on DSA placements if one wants to call it that and they just don't convert. Okay. So typically all of those uh settings in that area in asset optimization I would typically turn off just because I don't believe that they work very well or are very easily controllable. You can of course exclude some URLs in there but that's not the point. I feel that's very often one source where people bleed a lot of money. Other settings of course important as well. Wrong location settings, right? Typical for every sort of normal campaign, but um presence of interest that you bleed a little bit of money there. That those are sort of common settings. But another one which I find is uh uh quite stark is that typically TV screens are um activated in the PMAX campaign as well and some spend goes through there. Now, I'm not saying it's a lot of spend. Typically, this is minute, but ask yourself, how often have you bought um you know, direct response anything from a TV? Uh you may have. I haven't really much in the past. I feel it's a very unpredictable and not really suitable placement to run uh basically what is a shopping campaign on steroids. And I would advise you to not tick that box there and to have TV screens unticked. That is this is the wrong setting that we very often see. Then lastly, something that I see is that um people don't exclude their brand. Okay, so that is why they run a Pmax campaign and say, "Oh my god, it's working. The rowass is insane." And then they spend more money and suddenly they're like, "Hm, it's falling off a cliff. How is that possible?" Because your brand volume is not infinite. There's only so many people looking for your brand. And as I mentioned before, Pmax favor as the bottom funnel and will try to put the spend there first. So what happens is if you have brand included in your ads is that the first the spend will go towards brand and the raw assass will look insane and then when you increase the spend any additional spend beyond that will actually start to be put into non-branded cold search into colder keywords. As it turns out those of course have a much lower rorowass and your rorowass tanks suddenly from even just few euros, pounds, dollars more per month. Okay, so this is the wrong setting that I see in a lot of ad accounts. You should always split brand and non-brand. And how you do that, you should also listen to my episode how to split brand and non-brand uh which you can look back um and listen to. So this is where most PMAX settings in the settings uh um bleed money and that is why they typically do not work. often I see the wrong strategy chosen as well. So typically I see um a lot of people starting off with PMAX and using maximize conversions or maximize conversion value as the bit strategy. To be honest, that's probably the best shot you get at getting this to work off the ground, especially if your ad account is new. But typically, it's just the wrong strategy. I would probably use um a shopping campaign or max clicks or manual CPC in order to get an ad account off the ground and work my yourself up to semi-automated bid strategies and then fully automated bid strategies. I've also seen a case the other day where someone's said to me, "My PMAX is not spending and then they've chosen a target CPA of €7 for a product that costs, I don't know, something like €100 or something. So, of course, it's not going to work. You're not going to spend because the bid strategy is suffocated. So, it's just not going to work." Right? Then, typically, something that I see when it very often doesn't work or why why it produces poorer return on ad spend is that um we have asset groups that do not have shopping included. So typically be this happens very often if you create a PMAX before you even connect your merchant center to the ad account that you will create asset groups that do not have listing groups or they don't actually have your shopping products in there. Um this is a strate that a lot of people use to emulate a setup for um search. Okay. So, in terms of uh trying to have an asset group that covers an aspect that they would typically build a search campaign for, I'm not convinced that they do very well. We've had literally I was speaking to uh a training client yesterday who had such a pmax. Um and we let it run on minimal spend now, but it used to have tons of spend on it and it was crazy unprofitable because it was basically a searchbased pmax. Okay. Um, that's doesn't really work. As I said, PMAX is a relic of uh of smart shopping and typically inherently a shopping based campaign. You can't use it really for search and you shouldn't really uh it's always almost better to try your best to use search campaigns first before you try a weird thing like that. So, it's just using the wrong strategy and it's not really using the right uh um features of the campaign. Then typically something that I see very often is that people um just strategize poorly with Pmax. Okay. So typically what I see very often is either that they stuff all of their asset groups into one PMAX and just hope that it automatically optimizes properly to all the different product types that they're trying to cover that probably have different margins, right? Um and uh uh hope that uh Google will automatically know how much budget to allocate to what asset group or to which part of the business. So I just see that very often um uh happening and uh producing odd results and very often what I see is that people for instance have one product um but they are like forcing or trying to force the algo to some really really strange uh to do really strange things such as for instance they build an asset group for each angle of the product. Don't I'm not saying that can't work, but typically this is not an approach that I would recommend to get a Pmax off the ground. This is something that more advanced that you can try and test at the beginning. It just dilutes your efforts. Focus on the most obvious angle and just try to get your asset group to work. What I mean with that is for instance, we've had a client once who sells a certain product that can be used as obviously something searches someone searches directly for the product, but it could also be a gift for a wedding for ance and it could also be a gift to another occasion. Right? So he had three asset groups posing for the same product with just those three different angles. Um and it just diluted his efforts because mo the just the direct angle is what worked best. Okay. So this is something that you should be considering. Then something that goes very wrong when we're already talking about asset groups is s***** creative full stop. Um Um with that I mean that um the headlines were halfass asked, the long headlines were half half asked, the descriptions were halfass asked etc etc. What should be happening is for each each asset group should be tightly linked to uh relating to the landing page that you're sending people to and to the products that you are trying and of course the ser or service that you're trying to promote. And I very often see that people are just lazy, right? Uh maybe just a couple of headlines, few descriptions, etc. Um, halfass in all of it, not really um being good with their copy. So, this is something I see um going wrong very often. Same with imagery, right? With the imagery, you can actually start getting real creative because you're not limited by promotional overlay or something like that. You can go really salesy. You can have really nice creative. You can even repurpose creative from Meta, right? So, this is very often stuff that is missing and uh that I see wrong. I don't think this is a huge problem though like especially the creative part because typically uh the display uh part of Pmax gets very little ad spend in total from the entire mix. Uh be that's why you should and this is my last point which is in my opinion one of the most important parts is that the feed sucks and this is typically one of the core issues that I see people um like all of them points that I mention are super important and play huge part. Some of them can quietly bleed a lot of money. For instance, the DSA, the asset optimization setting. But, and this is the big butt, even if all of your settings are correct, your PMAX might still suck and still not work because your feed sucks. And in the end, it always comes in Google down to fundamentals. Your conversion tracking needs to be solid. First party data needs to be solid. Your feed needs to be rock solid. Then you can do good media buying. So, very often people just try and switch on a Pax and trying to sell their products without having done the work of actually optimizing their feed and understanding does all of this actually attract the right clicks. Does a buyer who searches for my product actually want to click on my product? And also does someone want to buy this at all? Is the offer good? Is it better than my competitors etc. And that is why most Paxes fail. And if this sounds similar then um we can of course help. You can always send me a message on LinkedIn, Jeremy Young on Google Ads. You can also send me an email, Jeremyanddigital.arketing. You will find that on our website, this email address, where you can also book a calendar call if you want with me for free onetoone for 30 minutes. Um, and there you will have to go to youngigital.mmarketing. Um, we're having a new website done today. So, um, this is Friday now where I'm recording. We're heading to, um, a good friend of mine who is a fantastic developer. I'm really looking forward to that and very likely when you visit the website soon it'll have a brand new shine. On that note, um thank you very much for listening and I'll see you in the next episode.