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The Paid Search Podcast | A Weekly Podcast About Google Ads and Online Marketing
Demystifying Performance Max (Episode 501)
00:29:28
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Hello and welcome to the paid search podcast. My name is Chris and today we're going to talk about Performance Max. It's been a topic that has been kind of tiptoed around, but we're going to dive in head first and my friend Joey Bidner is going to give an honest guide to how to use Performance Max. Something that is the do's and don'ts of what it is and what it's not, which is very important. Also going to jump into the end of the show and I'm going to tell you about a tool that everyone forgets about and it is a incredibly useful tool. It's Google Ads Editor. If you don't know what I'm talking about, please stick around. If you manage multiple accounts, you manage a large account, or you just, maybe you only have eight hours a day to work, maybe you only have 12 hours a day. If you live within the restraints of time in your world. I'm talking to everyone that's you. You should use Google Ads Editor because this tool will save you time and that's what you need, right? So that you can get to other things. So it is very important to use this tool. I'm going to remind you why it's great. But before we do that, Joey's going to jump in and talk about Performance Max and give you a real deep discussion about why it is a good thing and a bad thing in some situations and how you should use it. We're going to get jumped to that in a second, but before we do, I want to tell you some amazing news. Big news here. Optio is coming out with a special offer from people that are listening to this podcast. This has been something that's been 18 months in, in, in in of work for them and they're launching new features. So Optio has opened the floodgates to something that I've been very excited to tell you about. They gave me a sneak peek into this. It has, it's, it's no longer just a recommendation tool. This is now becoming an ultimate power tool for Google Ads and it's a multi channel system now. You can use optio for LinkedIn, Meta and Microsoft now. And essentially there is a way. Instead of just getting recommendations, it's integrating AI so that you can chat with your data. You can ask it questions like account performance, get a health check on your account, audit your ad copy, generate ads from landing pagers, landing pages. And something that is everyone needs is a keyword finder tool to help you find new keywords and this is a huge opportunity. If you haven't tried Optio in the past, this is a great time to jump in. They're still offering a the same 28 day free trial. So if you've been ignoring my suggestions, now is the time to jump in. Because they have an analyze with AI button is it's all over. So you're looking at something you say, I don't really even know how to interpret this right. Instead of just getting a recommendation, you can say analyze this with their AI tool. You can get quick answers to things like why is my CPC increasing? And you can get exclusive offer to this unique opportunity to try and get in early on this tool and try it before anyone else. I'm honored that they would give me the opportunity to announce this and share this and share this with my listeners because it's something that is unique to listeners of this podcast that you can try for free and get exclusive access to this new launch, this relaunch of Optio, that's that's the new power tool for Google Ads and beyond. So as always, you can try it@optio.com PSP the link is in the description. Wherever you are listening or watching, this is a limited opportunity for you to jump in on this new tool and try it for free. Everybody's loving AI and what it can do, and especially for saving time. And now Optio saves even more time because it's not just recommendations anymore, it is an entire new system. All right, so Joey, take it away.
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Hey, what's up, Chris? So I think it's about time that I start talking about Performance Max. I've been more or less avoiding this conversation for a little while. Not because I don't like Performance Max or I don't use it simply because Performance max sort of broke this idea of best practices in the sense where I could come on here and recommend a strategy that I use that anybody could just pick up and take off with. I personally find that Performance max, or structures in general in today's environment of Google Ads are truly like a case by case basis, where something that works wonderfully in one account might not work at all for another account that is in the same kind of category. Structure is truly something that needs to be more or less uncovered for each account. At least that's what I'm finding. But when it comes to performance max, I do want to share how I am using it. I want to share how I'm not using it in cases where I will avoid it, but also more or less speak to the the roots of Performance Max. I want to talk about what shapes my decisions with Performance Max based off of its core, of what it is and what it does. And I guess that's where we will start, is talking a little bit about Performance Max theory and, and my findings with it. So let's start there. Let's start by talking about what is Performance Max, what does it do? And I personally find that Performance Max is a lead, nurturing campaign. I personally find it to be good at taking traffic that you already have in your pipeline and nurturing it. To close the analogy that I like to use when explaining what Performance Max is, is it's kind of like if you're fishing, okay, and you've got a fishing rod and a net, I find Performance Max is like the net that's scooping up the fish by the boat. It does a good job of closing traffic that is already on your line, circling the boat. And an example of this in practice kind of shows itself if you've ever launched a Performance Max. Because when you launch Performance Max right out of the gate, and I'm sure I'm not the only one that's experienced this is performance is incredible in the first couple weeks, right? Like you see ROAS numbers like you've never seen before and then they dwindle away. And why is that? Right? Why does it do that? And that's because it is nurturing and closing all that traffic that's already in your pipeline. This could have been traffic that was generated from your search and shopping campaigns that may be paused or are still running. It could be traffic that is brought in by a Facebook strategy. Right? Anybody that's in your pipeline, Performance Max does a great job of saying, oh, that's me, I did that, I closed that. And it does do a good job of nurturing them, you know, that's why it's got display and video and discovery and all these parts that basically remarket to your existing traffic. And when I say remarketing, I also don't just mean it. Remarkets in the form of display remarketing. Performance Max will also do a lot of remarketing in the form of search and shopping. If there are two people that perform the same search, one of them is a person who has never been to your site before and the other is a person who's been to your site before or has purchased from you before. PMAX is going to lean into that person who's already been to your site. It's going to go for the low hanging fruit because it knows that it's got an easier time to close that traffic. And this is why. Performance Max can look great at the beginning, but if it's over leveraged, it can dwindle out because it's not all that great at traffic acquisition, at going after cold traffic, simply because it's riskier. And that's why, for the most part, my strategy with performance max is using what's called a feeder strategy. And this is not a strategy that I came up with. It's a strategy that has been spoken about by guys like John Moran and other thought leaders in the space. And it's a strategy where you actually run search and shopping alongside your performance Max to feed it that cold traffic. So what this looks like is your search and shopping campaigns will typically have a lower target roas than the performance Max campaign in order to signal to the algorithm, okay, you can be a little bit more exploratory with the traffic that you bring in, going after cold traffic for search and shopping, and then pmax is going to nurture it to close. And what this looks like is from a return on ad spend standpoint, is performance Max is always going to look better, right? It's always going to look better, it's always going to have that stronger return on ad spend. But we need to have the discipline to not necessarily react to the return on ad spend numbers at the campaign level. We need to look at them holistically. And you can run some tests where, okay, if I turn off or bring down my search and shopping campaigns, how does it affect my top line numbers of the account and give it a good amount of time to make that evaluate. You need to give it enough time for whatever people are in your pipeline there. You have to look past that time frame. So this is how I'm typically running performance max campaigns. But I will mention this is mostly for accounts that are a little bit larger and looking to scale for my smaller accounts, I'll be honest, I think search and shopping do a much better job. So for these smaller clients that still have search or shopping, it's not to say that you shouldn't try performance max, but you do need to evaluate if you have enough budget to make it worth that test to try. Because something you always have to remember is performance max is splitting your budget. Not evenly, but it's splitting your budget amongst all the channels, right? It's got search, shopping, display, discovery, Gmail, YouTube. And if you have a tiny budget, you need to give a huge amount of time to evaluate if performance max is going to work for you or not? Because you have to give the system enough time to test all of these channels and to figure out its formula of what works. It's not going to be as streamlined as search or shopping where it's just going to focus on those products and those keywords. It's got a lot more going on. And speaking to that. If you do want to try the feeder strategy again, if you have a small budget, it's just not going to work. It's not going to work to have $5 a day in each account. You need to have substantially larger budgets to justify running all three of those campaigns, let alone a performance max campaign. So if you are looking to test performance max and you do have a smaller budget, I'd say just run a performance max campaign. It's okay to test it and try. And if you're going to test it, make sure you mark the date where you turned off the other campaigns and you give yourself a good amount of time to run that pmax, like at least three months and then you can evaluate what its impact was. Now one thing I want to mention that I see a lot in coaching calls is people launching performance max campaigns and not wanting it to spend on those higher funnel channels, not wanting it to spend on display, video, YouTube and they'll do something that early on in performance Max in its history we used to run which were those feed only campaigns where you don't give it those assets. And my opinion about feed only campaigns has changed in the last year or so where if you don't want performance max to be on display and video and YouTube don't run performance max. I personally do not see a benefit anymore in a feed only campaign. In comparing a feed only campaign to a shopping campaign, it's just the shopping campaign with way less control and some dynamic remarketing fit into it. So I do not run feed only and I will recommend if you're not okay with pmax doing that higher funnel spending, then don't run it. But I will say pmax has gotten a lot better at not overspending on those channels. And we can see this now in your insights tab there is a button, a tab, actually a new tab for channel reporting. And we can see how much it's spending on each channel. And in pretty much all my accounts it's 80 to 90% in the search and shopping network and a small amount in those other channels. Google figured out that people will not run a performance max campaign. If Google's going to be greedy and serve a lot Extra delivery on those high funnel channels. So they got wise and gave it a purpose of keeping it low funnel. And I want to talk about a couple other small points in the nitty gritty of running performance max campaigns that I again see a lot in coaching calls. And that relates to structure, right? Asset groups and audience signals. I want to speak about this quickly. Where asset groups, you only want to have different asset groups. If you have different assets, structuring asset groups by audience signals is completely useless. I'll get into more into audience signals in a second. But your asset group is not going to be controlled by the audience signals. So you could have two different asset groups, let's say with the same assets and different audience signals and they will show to the exact same or different people. It'll have no real impact by the audience signal. You only want to split them if you truly have separate assets that are maybe dictated by the specific products that you have in them that you want segmented. But I'll be honest, in most of my performance max campaigns, there's a whole lot of consolidation here. And I am not running complicated assets group structures. In many cases I just have one asset group with all my products and some pretty high level branding assets just to speak to the business itself. And, and my reason to do this is we don't have insight on search terms at the asset level. If I segment different asset groups with even different products or different assets or different services, whatever I'm not able to see or verify did are my search terms matching my asset group. So we have no control or visibility into if our segmentation is even working. So to be honest, I don't do a whole lot of it. I do a lot of consolidation. Remember, this campaign type is for lead nurturing and our prospecting for me is still done by search and shopping, which is segmented by product types and ad groups. But when it goes to, when it comes to audience signals, I also need to mention this again. Audience signals are not like audiences in search and shopping campaigns where if we want we can control to say, oh, I only want this showing to these audiences. It is a signal. It's basically a suggested direction to Google to point it in the right direction. Whether or not it even truly uses those audience signals is a question everybody has and will never know. We don't see data at the, at the audience level. We can just speculate on its impact. So my recommendation is I still use them, but less is more. I will only put the specific audiences that truly speak to the searcher. I'm trying to get in front of. So I'll pick a couple in market audiences. I'll put some custom audiences together with the, with the keywords. I'll put my remarketing audiences in there after the campaign has run for a little while. I want the campaign to first look at those cold traffic audiences. But your Performance Max campaign is going to remarket no matter what. So whether you put the remarketing audiences in there or not, it's always gonna remarket and it will never only remarket. I always see people make those remarketing asset groups. Those don't do anything. It's all a big soup mixture of cold and warm traffic. So I hope this helped demystify performance Max a little bit. I will say one more time, just to paint a picture in everybody's mind on Performance Max's role in your account. At least in my perspective, if you're fishing in a boat, Performance Max is the net scooping up the fish. And your search and shopping campaigns are your lines that you are casting out to bring in those new customers. So measure it holistically and see how leveraging these campaigns together push the top line account goals. All right, Chris, I'll pass it back to you and I'll see you next time.
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All right, thank you, Joey. If you'd like to reach out to Joey, you can do so@joeybidner.com the link will be in the show notes for for today's episode. So let's get to, as promised, a reminder about one of the best tools for using the a free tool, a free software that Google creates. And I'm going to give you the what, who, where, when, why breakdown of what this is. So if you haven't been convinced and you haven't jumped in on Google Ads Editor, let me tell you the what. So what is Google Ads Editor? Well, it is a free software created by Google. It's designed to do large changes, bulk changes quickly in any account that you have access to. Okay. It can do multiple accounts. So it's not you don't have to log into each individual one. You can have your MCC connected to it and manage any of your client accounts or your single account through this Google Ads Editor. So all and here's the great part about what it is all the edits and changes that you make to your keywords, to your ad copy, to your campaign settings. Every single aspect of Google Ads can be edited and changed right, right here in this Google Ads Editor tool. And it is done locally on your computer. So it edited it you know, you change a headline on 15 ads and it's done right there. And when you're ready and you've confirmed, okay, yep, this is what I want. I've added 15 keywords. I've, I've changed all of these to phrase match and I've turned these keywords off and I built a new ad group and I, you know, you know, wrote the ads for that and I've turned it all on. I set the bids, I'm ready to go. You hit the upload button, then it goes live to Google instantly, just like that. So I'll tell you why this is an amazing thing in a second. But let's talk about who should use it. So who am I talking to here? Anyone who manages multiple accounts or manages a large account or like I said at the beginning of the show, if you're within the strains of the this world's time, if you only have 24 hours in the day, then I'm talking to you because using the Google Ads Standard UI, the standard Google Ads login, where you go to ads.google.com, you log in, you make your ad changes. Let me tell you, it's never been worse. I don't think. I really don't think the UI has ever been worse. It is bloated, slow, constantly has errors. There's constantly. Whenever I'm working on accounts, I always have to refresh. I find bugs constantly. And the Google Ads Editor is prompt and fast and quick. I can make changes very quickly and upload it. Boom, I'm done. Okay, so anyone who is interested in that should use this tool. So how do you use it? Well, you go to the Google Ads Editor page. So if you don't know what that is, just search Google Ads Editor on Google and find the software and download it. Okay, it's free download. It works on Mac and Windows. So you connect your Google Ads login, you download all of the accounts that you're connected to, you can make changes and then upload those changes back to Google. Alright, so it's also great because when you download the changes, you actually have a copy of the account. You can actually export that and have a formal copy of the account. That's kind of a snapshot of what that account was like, how it was built, how it was working at that day and time that you downloaded it, which is a very unique thing. Alright, so when do you use it? And hopefully, hopefully these last couple points are going to convince you to jump in and finally try it. Okay, I preach Google Ads Editor all the time to people, especially for those of you that are agencies or managers yourself, please try it. So when should you use it? Well, I highly, highly recommend it for campaign builds. If you are building a new campaign, whether for a new client or a new idea you want to try it is perfect and absolutely ideal for new campaign builds. You can also use it for ad copy changes. You know, if you need to change a bunch of headlines, you can highlight all of the ads at once and change them. You know, if you have a kind of template that you're using, you can change them all at once or do a search and find and replace type of changes. You know, if you want to change all the keywords, you know, let's say you want to launch a new campaign and instead of it being a patio campaign, now you're going to do a driveway campaign. So you copy the campaign, find all the instances of the word patio, find and replace and change it with driveway. I mean, you're halfway there. You've already changed all the, you know, basics of all of that. The keywords and the ads have all been changed from patio to driveway. Probably a few more things you need to change here and there, but my goodness, you've saved yourself so much time. What I don't think you should use it for is checking metrics, like looking at, you know, how many clicks what, what your click through rate is, what your conversions are doing. You don't use it for search terms, you don't use it for daily, weekly tasks. That's not something you should do. Absolutely not. I do not endorse that. That is still going to be something that needs to be done in the standard Google Ads UI on google.com now why should you use it? And this is the best argument I can give you and I am 100% serious. I am not, I'm not sugarcoating this. I'm not lying in any way. People have seen me do this. People that book me for coaching and want me to build a campaign for them. I could point out to the audience right now and people will raise their hand and I can tell you they have seen me build a new campaign from zero to built 10 minutes using Google Ads Editor. I mean, can you say you've ever built a campaign in 10 minutes that actually, that's actually not a crappy campaign? I absolutely have. I do it all the time. I can build a campaign, boom, boom, boom, create it, throw some keywords in, go in, do my keyword research on that, write some ad copy really quick, you know, Ad copy drags it out. You know, it might take me a little longer to, to write some ad copy and be actually creative. But hey, that's what AI is for. AI writes the ad copy for me. Copy paste, boom, done. I'm done in like 10 minutes. I mean, that is enough reason right there because campaign builds are the biggest drag when you're using it. When you're doing it in Google Ads ui, it's awful. You can edit accounts in seconds and you can. This is probably my favorite thing. You can check for little hidden things that you would otherwise completely miss in the Google Ads ui. Like, for example, you might miss that this ad group has a certain number of negative keywords in that ad group that are not anywhere else. Or there might be certain device bids that are set up for certain ad groups that you completely missed. Or there might be an audience that is targeted in a certain campaign that you had no idea was even there. There's all kinds of little subtle changes that you can very quickly check because it's right there. It's all in a wonderful tree that you can expand and collapse and see all of it very easily. You know how many keywords it says right there, here's how many keywords, and you can review all that very quickly. So I hope that has convinced you to try to try out Google Ads Editor. And also if you're still here, remember you've gotten a great opportunity here to also try another power tool that is just launching. It's on the cusp of, you know, launching for everyone, but you can try it for free for 28 days. Optio.com to try the free tool. It is a special offer exclusively here to try this new launch of this amazing tool that they've been working on for so long. All right, and with that, I'm Chris Schaefer. You can find me Chris Schaefer.com for coaching services, management services. Reach out to me. Also, as you know, you can email the podcast to get your questions answered. Paid searchpodcast@gmail.com for questions. Otherwise, I'll see you guys next week.