Google’s Performance Max is replacing Smart Shopping Campaigns (SSC). They’re being a little hazy on timings (likely to be from July 2022) but one thing is certain: your SSCs will be ‘upgraded’ so we recommend that you prepare for this now. You can actually migrate now (from April 2022) so we’ve put this blog together to help you understand what you can expect – the good and the not so good.
This is Google’s explanation of their new ad product: “pMax is a new goal-based campaign type that allows performance advertisers to access all of their Google Ads inventory from a single campaign. It’s designed to complement your keyword-based Search campaigns to help you find more converting customers across all of Google’s channels like YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail, and Maps.”
The big deal with Google’s pMax is that it gives you greater exposure across an expanded Google network leading to, potentially, better results. We’ve been conducting live testing, and here’s our current thinking based on our early findings.
pMax: the good
- You can create more than one ad group per campaign (now called ‘asset groups’)
- Within these asset groups, you can direct google ads to the correct potential customers using audiences, keywords, competition and more
- Google is giving access to actual data (eg insights including keyword themes) not just the ‘results’
pMax: the not so good
- Cannibalisation of other campaigns is inevitable, including Search, if you aren’t an experienced advertiser
- Performance is very mixed currently
- Reporting is extremely poor; metrics are inconclusive and lots of data is missing and unclear.
Let’s drill down a little more.
Google’s pMax key features
In order to get the max out of pMax, there are a number of key features to get your head around:
Conversion goals
Arguably the most important part of any Google Ads campaign, ensure your conversion goals are set up correctly, Performance Max depends on them, and will deliver based around these, so this is vital, note you are able to setup different goals for different pMax campaigns. You have a choice of three goals: online sales, lead generation and offline sales. This is worth spending time on and making sure your goals align with all your commercial activities. According to Google, you can get the most benefit out of their automation by using the same goals across all your campaigns, not just pMax.
Final url expansion
This is Google’s advice: “Use Final URL expansion to replace your Final URL with a more relevant landing page based on the user’s search query and intent, and to customize a dynamic ad headline that matches your landing page content.” And: “Reach more customers matching your business through new relevant queries that may not serve through your regular campaigns.
This is Google’s way of going beyond the data you are providing, it allows google ads to find conversions in other areas of your site. Note, this can lead to cannibalisation of your search campaigns, so use this with caution.
Asset groups
Performance Max moves from ‘ad formats’ to ‘asset groups’ related to a single theme or audience. Multiple asset groups can be created per campaign. Over to Google:
“An asset group is a collection of creatives centered on a theme or related to a target audience. The creatives of your asset group are used to assemble all of your ads and build an inventory for all applicable ad formats for your advertising objective.”
The benefit of Google’s asset groups is the ability to segment. Say you have 50 brands with more than one audience group; now you can target them accordingly, basing the groups on the sections or product categories as they appear on your website. This is particularly useful for different brands or product types. You can keep an eye on performance of the asset group creatives as well, Google will rate the creatives using a ‘poor, average, good, excellent’ rating.
Audience signals
Regarded by some as a powerful search tool, ‘audience signals’ is how you alert Google that a segment of users is more likely to convert. According to Google: “Your ads will automatically be shown to people who are most likely to convert for your goals. You can speed up optimisation by providing audience signals.”
Google will use your data to help identify consumers who are likely to exhibit relevant behaviours and interests.
We have been running some interesting experiments utilising our clients’ data to direct google towards customers more likely to convert.
Setting up ad extensions
You can choose to use existing account-level site link extensions or select and create specific site links for the pMax campaigns. Google Performance Max will also suggest extension formats based on your goals (see above). For instance, if your primary goal includes lead generation, Google will suggest creating a lead form extension. You can also add structured snippets, price extensions, promotion extensions, callouts, location and call extensions. One note of caution: you need to be skilled at managing this across all your campaigns in order to avoid cannibalising and reducing their effectiveness.
Reporting and insights
Reporting breaks down your campaign performance based on what the machine learning is accomplishing and the signals being used. Granular it isn’t!
First, the things you can understand:
- Top, account-level campaign performance (such as sales or click through rate…)
- Location performance, including at store level
- Frequency – eg hour-of-day, day-of-week, and day and hour combined
Now for the things you can’t report on, some of which are pretty fundamental:
- You get excited by the account level “10 conversions” (with spend to match, so it’s real) but when you delve a little deeper, clarity on where the sales are being achieved is missing
- Though you can add multiple asset groups, it’s not possible to report on performance according to these individual groups
- There’s no way to tell who saw your ad – there’s no audience reporting, no keyword reporting (except for keyword themes, which isnt absolute), no demographic reporting, etc
- It’s not even possible to understand performance broken down by device
It’s worth noting that performance reporting has been acknowledged as a shortfall and we understand that Google might be taking steps to improve transparency within pMax campaigns.
Plan your migration to pMax
Get a strategy in place to migrate at your own pace. We recommend you test on a product type or brand that has enough conversions to give you some solid data for 2-4 weeks. Do NOT choose your top performer responsible for 90% of your site sales.
Keep investing in your keyword Search campaigns and running them alongside pMax to see the best results. And remember: though Standard Shopping is remaining, pMax will take priority for the same products advertised.
Google’s pMax: converting more customers?
Performance Max is certainly a “new goal-based campaign” for Google which is clearly putting more and more emphasis upon machine learning to inform its automation. pMax is a ‘one-stop shop’, making it easier to advertise and reach people across all of Google’s advertising channels using a single campaign. However, it doesn’t encourage anything other than a basic strategy because Google’s pretty much in charge. It’s all a bit ‘lowest common denominator’…
You could argue that Google is encouraging advertisers to think about their audience a little more, especially with the focus on asset groups, audience signals and url expansion. And sure, you get conversions, but at the expense of a lot of wasted budget.
Google pMax isn’t making it easy to convert more customers, especially if you aren’t an experienced advertiser. So, here are our 6 tips to help you get started:
- Start experimenting as soon as you can but don’t go all in until you know how it’s working for you. Use small data sets of positive and negative performance on your smart shopping so you can measure ‘success’
- Start with small budgets then scale up when performance looks promising
- Make sure your data feed is fully optimised
- Split asset groups by common themes (eg brands, product types…)
- Constantly review other areas of the account to ensure minimal cannibalisation and no drops in traffic or impressions in other areas.
- Finally, this is still a testing stage with a 4-6 week learning period so be prepared for things to change
Good luck, and remember Google’s statement that pMax is “designed to complement your keyword-based Search campaigns to help you find more converting customers…” That’s where the ppc specialist can help…
Image credit: blog.google.com
