Should You Run Brand Campaigns with Performance Max?

[00:00:00] John: And welcome to the next customer acquisition show. From Tier 11 this week we have our recurring what's working now on Google Performance Max, with our amazing Google team, Rashna, Santosh and Nick, welcome. Hey, Greg, to be here again. So Nick, you were telling me beforehand that we're celebrating a birthday today.

[00:00:21] John: Not today, I think it's the 1st of November. It's gonna be one year since Performance Max was officially released. It was in beta before that, but it'll be November that it was officially released. So we're coming up to a year of performance Max. So year's, like always a really good time to reflect about what has happened in the past year, what would you say are your biggest takeaways over the last 12 months with performance Max?

[00:00:47] John: Well, big one is that this is not just a new campaign type that was released and it was something extra. I mean, this is a huge shift and the direction that Google Ads is heading. that's the big takeaway, number one. The second takeaway I would say is that Performance Max has been amazing for e-commerce and for digital sales as well.

[00:01:10] John: Any sales oriented, online sales oriented businesses, it's been really, really amazing. We've seen some results where we've literally doubled clients' online sales through using performance marks. the other takeaway is that there's still a lot of questions in the market performance marks, and in some cases there's more questions than I would say answers.

[00:01:31] John: So we're. Staying at the tip of the spear. And what we know about Performance Max now compared to when it was released is night and day. Nice. How about you? Rashna. Santosh. for me, I'm gonna say the first thing that if all the early adapters had actually made the most of it, and then anybody who was just, panicking after six months and then wanted to test performance, max wrecked it out because there was so many changes that had come up around, even Google was not sure about like, how it's gonna go.

[00:02:05] John: The early adopters made a lot testing performance marks. I think we've been actually helping Google to see how performance marks actually works. So it's still played a very important role for anybody who was actually testing in. that's a great point.

[00:02:21] John: the early adopters who embraced performance marks really, I mean, we found it was early this year, even though it was released in November, it was really early this year. We found that we started implementing it in our accounts and clients started using it too, and we learned so much. for the advertisers that are just starting to use Performance Max, I'd feel like it's going to be somewhat, it can be confusing.

[00:02:43] John: So I think Russia's right, early adopters have been way ahead of.

[00:02:47] John: And also the people who really intended to play with it, find ways around it. And not just following the guide like what Google releases. Like this is this five steps you need to do. That was something actually very important for people who really wanted to play with it and not just follow the guides.

[00:03:07] John: For me folks, the biggest takeaway is that when Performance Max came in picture, we thought we were out of business, but here we are after the year performance Max. That's right. There was a perception that Google was releasing this, so anybody can run Google ads, just press a button and like a transformer, it just turns into all the campaigns we found that's definitely not the case. actually I think the opposite. I mean, Santosh, would you agree? absolutely. I have seen it all. Nick. I have seen accounts where there are 110 performance max campaigns created. They have both the limits. And I have seen accounts where even somebody just doing feed only performance Max is not able to do.

[00:03:47] John: there is definitely lot of room for folks like us, agencies like us, especially like us, who really know their stuff to come and make a difference than somebody just trying to run with it not knowing. And I think the biggest thing is that what, I have experienced is that the earth of pressing the buttons in performance max.

[00:04:07] John: Will derail you more often than not? , right. I think we've talked about this. You need to know what not to do just as much as you need to know what to do. and honestly, if I was talking to business owners before a performance max, I would, in some cases I would recommend, I would say you could probably run your own Google ads.

[00:04:27] John: it does take work and you need to understand this, this, and this, but you can do some courses and you can probably run this in your spare time and you would use an agency if you need to free up that time and get some extra expertise. I honestly wouldn't recommend the average business owner to try and go in and run performance Max.

[00:04:46] John: The amount of tweaking and button pushing is less, but the amount of analysis has increased and the amount of understanding of how Google ads works has increased. At the same time, we must caution folks who are trying to listen to Google Ads reps. Take their directions and run Performance Max.

[00:05:06] John: They should not do that as well. We do not recommend it. yesterday I had such a weird conversation with the rep and I told the rep, and like the issue that I had with the re, he resolved it afterwards. He was just getting onto the auto applied recommendation. I was like, oh my God. Now again. Then he said, was like, you check this on, check this on, check this on.

[00:05:28] John: And then I was like, okay, I'll I do it after the call. But he was so persuasive. He was like, no, no, no. Go apply, . You have to select all these check off and then apply them right away on the call. I'm like, how can you be so pushy? Right. And I think this is something that can be confusing to business owners too, is that the official Google recommendations Are created by the Google team who are not advertisers. So Google has obviously some of the most amazing engineers in the world building these advertising products. But the recommendations that are made are usually made with the objective of increasing Google's revenue, increasing Google's ad spend. So they're trying to get advertisers to do certain things, and most of the time those things are gonna increase ad spend and usually don't result in better performance.

[00:06:24] John: on the flip side, we want Google reps because we have access to new features and we also can get problems resolved. So we're always talking to Google reps in a way, yes, we want this problem fixed, but no, we're not gonna do those other things you're telling us to do . And that's how Performance Max was actually framed.

[00:06:42] John: That, anybody can run this performance max. and you'll be able to take control in your hand. Like you don't need anybody's help anymore. How you, it was sugar coated for people and people actually borrow, that now more than ever, it's needed somebody expertise. It's like, you have 10 customers in the market and they're like hundred advertisers trying to get those 10 people.

[00:07:04] John: And all of them have, are doing the same technique. Like, everybody's using that same method. How are you gonna win those 10? That's where you know, knowing in and out about breaking the rules is only going to be able to crack Google ads. Let's give the people an example, something where the Google rep.

[00:07:22] John: not just recommended. They've been really pushing, saying, do this, do this, and we've done something else. And the what we've done has actually resulted in better performance. I think we should go back a second and talk about Google Rep motivations. I don't wanna get caught up in like they're pushing for revenue.

[00:07:38] John: I think there is this big disconnect in online advertising in general, where there's a separation from how things sh are supposed to work and how they actually work. And, right. Since they aren't necessarily in the ads every day, they can only go based off of the recommendations. I'll just put that out out there to say that.

[00:07:56] John: Let's assume good intentions of the Google reps. absolutely. I mean, we do know that they are in. To get the features implemented. what we're saying is there are certain features that Google is looking to test, they may not always be the best recommendation for what's currently going on in the account.

[00:08:13] John: the advertisers, say that just so anyone out there who's running their own Google ads can know this because if they talk to a Google rep, just be aware of that. If you're gonna win and press every recommendation that's in the account, it's likely gonna tank the account. Nice. All right.

[00:08:28] John: So back to your examples of a recommendation that didn't work out quite as well as Google expected it. So all the brackets where it says recommendation is actually might not be aligned with your goals at all. So if it says display expansion, turn it on, it's recommended.

[00:08:45] John: Oh yeah, that's it. Good one. Yeah, it, it is not recommended at all unless you have like black money on in your bank and you wanna just . And I just want to explain what that is for the folks who are watching. So if you are running a search campaign and you are looking to run your ads on the search results, so people search for your business or what your business provides or the products, and you wanna show up in those search results at the top, and that's how search ads generally work.

[00:09:21] John: There is a feature called display expansion where Google will also show your text ads, on websites in these little boxes on websites in the display network. Now, I have never seen that work when that's enabled. And we have seen just turning that off, it's one of the first things we check in an account.

[00:09:43] John: Just turning that off improves performance dramatically because Google will spend, it has these display placements. It's trying to push these text ads on onto display placements in websites, and I've just never seen it work. So it's something that the Google reps are always like, yes, do this, do this.

[00:10:01] John: So I know they're being pushed , by Google to basically get advertised to use this. I've never seen it work.. Yeah, similarly, I mean, there is one biggest issue that has been with Performance Max. Was not able to target specific locations.

[00:10:17] John: That was one day Google woke up and was like, oops, I forgot to enable that feature where everybody, all the advertisers had spent their money. They had no idea that that is going on. yeah, that is really bad. If you're launching a product in the market, you have to test these things out. If you are telling advertisers that you can select specific locations and they end up, showing ads in Asia, then that doesn't make really sense.

[00:10:44] John: So being aware of these things could happen can only be expected from a person who is knee deep into, running ads in with Google Ads. I consider myself an amateur performance Max Advertiser , had expectations that I started running the performance Max ads for tier 11.

[00:11:03] John: Things are gonna work as promised, but you quickly find out that the big change in performance Max, is, while it's easier to set up, it's a lot harder to get information out on, like what next steps should be. And that's when I happily handed it off to Santosh to run all of Tier elevens Google. What are some of the things that people could be doing when they're running Performance Max campaigns to like to help them decide what to do next?

[00:11:25] John: Besides handing it off to Santosha like, I did

[00:11:27] John: how can people look at what's going on within a Performance Max campaign? Analyze it. Like what should they be looking at to analyze, to help them decide on next steps? That's a big question

[00:11:39] John: told to ask by an amateur. I think I can start with some of the assumptions that. Came about with Performance Max and some things to watch out for. So when Performance Max was launched, because it uses all channels, it uses YouTube and display, a lot of people perceive that that Performance Max is now a top of funnel It's a top of final campaign type when it's actually it's full funnel. So a large part of Performance Max is still search. when you look at the insights in Performance Max, you want to look, there's an insights tab. You open up your Performance Max campaign. In the left column, there's an insights tab.

[00:12:15] John: You click on that Insights, you scroll down just a little bit and you are going to see, the search insights, which are gonna show you what keywords, what searches performance Max is targeting, so you can see if it's on the right track. . And that's really, really important because there can still be up to 50% of the budget in a Performance Max campaign going to search and then say 20% to YouTube, maybe 10% to display.

[00:12:40] John: And so don't just perceive this as a top of funnel outbound channel. it's everything. Don't neglect looking at the search insights because that's going to tell you what it's targeting in the search part.

[00:12:54] John: So that's one. Then I know it's a big question, so there's a lot, but I think if we can just, pick one thing that. I think for most of us, we should stick to the basics and look at the basic KPIs, and we should be looking at the right KPIs. So for example, if you're running Performance Max for an e-commerce account, you should be looking at it on an ads spend, not cost per conversion, because your cost per conversion can be anything, or your conversion rate can be anything but your return on ad spend, unless you are of course going for new customer acquisition.

[00:13:26] John: If that's not the goal, which is next level, you should be looking at the right KPI and not looking at vanity metric, trying to understand that. Okay this is where performance is. I had a good example of there were like five campaigns. One of them was converting at 0.24% and the other was converting at I think three X conversion rate.

[00:13:47] John: But the ROS was Two times higher , on the campaign, which was converting at one third the conversion rate. And the problem was that the average order value on the campaign, which was converting at low conversion rate, was two or three x, therefore the lowest was higher. So if you were to just look at conversion rate and say that, oh, because my campaign is converting at low conversion rate, my campaign is not doing well, I think you're looking at a wrong metric.

[00:14:14] John: Therefore stick to the basics, like look at the KPIs that really mattered. Right? I think that's a really important point to bring up about performance marks is the overall goal. You want to give Google the right goal, and if that is conversion value and revenue, it's going to go after that. The cost per click, the conversion rate, the click through rate.

[00:14:36] John: All of those metrics for Performance Max are going to be so different to other campaign types because it's using every channel. So display has the lowest cost per click and the lowest click through rate. So that's gonna make it look like click through rates are tanking and that, oh, but we're getting a great cost per click.

[00:14:57] John: It really is not useful. So as Santosh said, you wanna look at the overall goal conversions and conversion value is what matters. Yeah. The next that comes to my mind is also people have this misconception that Performance Max campaign works individually. it's so intricately, feeding off or connected to other campaigns.

[00:15:22] John: Also, there's a behavior. That needs to be, properly analyzed. So what is it doing? Is it testing YouTube? is it the retargeting? Is it going after more brand? All these things are also dependent on the behavior and the fluctuations with the satellite campaigns. So thinking that a Performance Max campaign is entirely depending upon its budget and the settings you have done, you also have to focus on the other campaigns that you're launching simultaneously with pax.

[00:15:51] John: So that's one more thing I want to add. I have one more to and this is again to the basics Yeah. Is that sometimes people make a mistake of looking at just the listing group performance and understanding this as the overall asset group performance. That's not the case because unless you are running a , asset group, which has URL expansion off, you are actually looking at just 20% of the.

[00:16:15] John: Clicks or convergence for that matter, because Performance Max is five, six different channels. So do not try to, , look at the performance of an asset group , or the campaign just by looking at listing groups. I think Nick, you had some really clever ways of looking at other channels like YouTube display those kind of performances through the report section, right.

[00:16:35] John: Google doesn't tell us, obviously, doesn't tell us in an obvious way how much is being spent on YouTube, how much is being spent on search, how much has been spent on shopping. However, because we wanna know these things, we found workarounds and we found our hacks to find out what it's spending.

[00:16:52] John: , and what Santosh is saying is that if you are running an e-commerce Brand. Then if you only look at the listing groups, you might see one listing group that has say, a five X Os and one that has a one X os for the same spend. That doesn't necessarily mean that that particular group is not working because it may be generating revenue from YouTube.

[00:17:16] John: It may be generating conversions from search. in a Performance Max campaign to see what percentage of spend is going towards a particular channel. If you wanna see YouTube, you can pull up a column for views and then you can pull up a column for average cost per view. And then you just multiply those and you're gonna get a number.

[00:17:35] John: And that number is, you can see what percentage of that that's your YouTube spend within Performance Max. And you can also pull up a report that has is just by product IDs and that'll tell you how much. Spend is going towards shopping and by deduction you can also work out okay, how much is gonna search and display.

[00:17:54] John: It's a little tricky to get display display spend. But I think knowing YouTube spend and knowing shopping spend that alone will, we'll give you an idea, okay, how much is Performance Max going top of funnel with YouTube? So those can be, those sort of things can be really handy. There are a couple points I wanna go a little bit deeper on.

[00:18:13] John: How should people, pick the right KPI or conversion event? that's a big question too. Well, I mean like, cuz there's a balance, right? Between finding what is the best for your business, but also making sure that there's enough of those conversions happening for the machine learning to be able to learn.

[00:18:30] John: How do I pick that let's just use like an e-com or a digital product brand, something where people are giving you their credit card to buy. I have like one clear advice to anyone looking, trying to understand performance and therefore the right conversion action.

[00:18:44] John: If you are into e-commerce and running campaigns for an e-commerce brand, what really moves the needle? the purchases, right? So add two cards, begin checkout, payment info, added product viewed. All of those are great conversion actions, but for performance max, those are vanity conversion accents. You should just be looking at purchases because that's the only thing that will move the needle at the end of the day.

[00:19:09] John: So would you say the purchase is your primary and then those other vanity ones will be your secondary? Absolutely. Yeah. . Yeah. It's also like, have a very clear objective of doing the campaign. What's the objective? If the objective is to get more leads, then you'll have different, you know, metrics to look at.

[00:19:29] John: If the objective is to increase the sales, then you'll have different way to look at it. So have a clear objective and the end goal, what's the end goal? Where do you want to take the campaign so that, to that? And I think, the right KPI for the business, I mean, that's, that's a big conversation, but that, that's a conversation we have, you know, very often with business owners, because everybody wants roas.

[00:19:55] John: Nobody ever emails and says, Hey, the ROAS is too high. You know, pull back guys, we're getting too much return on ad spend. Like, you know, we've gotta pull that back. That never happens. However, I think ROAS can often. Be used too much as a success metric when long term This is the customer acquisition show.

[00:20:11] John: this is what we're about at Trail 11. acquiring new customers and the long term, knowing that lifetime value, being able to make projections then around growth and ultimately, profit is the goal. increasing growth, increasing profit and ROAS can be a very important part of that.

[00:20:27] John: But we also see that as we increase spend, that ROAS is going to dip somewhat. But as long as we know the numbers and we're clear on the, leading metrics for profit, then we can confidently grow a business and know where the rollis needs to be. Can you use Performance Max to increase lifetime value?

[00:20:50] John: that's a great question. I think so. Yeah. absolutely. No, no, no. It's not that easy. I don't think. So. We need to have more control insights if Google agrees on, showing us what's going behind the machines and strategizing with other satellite campaigns, we could do it, but then reliability on that data would be so difficult.

[00:21:10] John: here's my take. I can't prove this yet, but with my tinfoil hat on where my hop office where Google is heading performance marks and Google Linux four have both been released around the same time. They're very closely related. Both of these both Performance Max and Google Analytics four. If you look into G four, you're gonna see a lot of features around lifetime value and predictive metrics Performance. Max, how's a feature where you can bid only for new customers and you can create two campaigns? One that bids only for new customers, one that is basically bidding for all customers.

[00:21:47] John: Now, that feature in Performance Max I would say still in beta. We haven't seen that work particularly well when we've compare new, customers in Shopify to what Google is telling us. And new customers, they tend to be very different. So I think Google hasn't worked that out yet, but I think that's where they're trying to head.

[00:22:03] John: So they're looking at lifetime value because look, we know Google have got to where they are. By, they didn't get here by making bad bets or bad decisions. So they're looking to the future and lifetime value. Customer acquisition is gonna become more and more important. And I think we're gonna see a shift from purely looking at ROAS to customer acquisition lifetime value.

[00:22:28] John: And I think that's where Performance Max is heading. I'm betting on Google getting that feature right? So we're going to be able to bid on only new customers and have certain KPIs for that in say, one performance Max campaign. But eventually we're gonna be have another campaign two, which is gonna be retargeting big on all customers.

[00:22:46] John: You could almost see, you'll have one campaign that'll be customer acquisition, another campaign that'll be increased lifetime value. So I think my opinion, I think that's where we're headed. I think there are things that you also need to do outside the box of Google Ads. to increase the lifetime value and average order value, stuff like that.

[00:23:03] John: Remember Nick, we talked about this, plugin that was recommended by John Moran called by the numbers. I think that's a great plugin for Shopify stores because it gives you lot of different customer segments to look at and know where the life and value can be increased, who are your repeat bias and stuff like that.

[00:23:23] John: So I. to do something like increasing the average order value or lifetime value, you've gotta have a holistic view and not just rely entirely on Google ads. There are things outside of Google Ads that can often make a difference. Of course, the upsales and resales are going to happen through your store.

[00:23:43] John: Google ads cannot really go that far. but I think what Nick was saying is that if Performance Max allows you to go for new customers and repeat customers, I think you have a good balancing act there. Once you have figured out the rest of the puzzle , could you do it now with like using your your targeting as your customer list and the, and creative that's a bit more geared around like buy again or buy this other thing we can nudge towards doing the campaign to do it.

[00:24:11] John: Then again, like not having a better clarity on what really it's bringing in and just making judgment upon the backend data to match with the campaign, what the campaign is showing definitely cannot restrict it to do exactly for that. But can be nudged with the strategic planning of the campaigns.

[00:24:28] John: Hey guys, why do I feel like our growth strategies have said these questions for us? ? I promise I wasn't paid at all. looking back a year performance Max, I think we've gone through this the adoption curve where we thought Performance Max was gonna be the end all be all and kill all Google Ads outside of Performance.

[00:24:47] John: Max, I think we've come back from that a little bit now. How do you guys balance performance, max versus normal? You know, Google ads and YouTube ads. I'll go ahead. Go ahead. Initially everybody was like, you know, the highlight of my account is going to be Performance Max and there's not gonna be much to do.

[00:25:04] John: I don't need the agency, I don't need you. So I think I'm better off , on my own. But then eventually everybody is starting to realize that performance Max is just a small piece that's eating up other things that you don't really see. If you let that be as careless then it's actually going to wreck the entire strategy for long term.

[00:25:26] John: Now it's just a part that in a big machine is just a tool that enables you to do certain things that you can make use of. But the overall strategy is the performance Max is not the highlight.

[00:25:38] John: Yeah. I think the strategy, yeah. it needs to be sound. and the way to get a good strategy, you have to understand how the other campaign tabs work. I mean, you take the players in a team, okay, and this is probably a really bad analogy, like if you have a basketball team, you have to know what the guards do, what their job is.

[00:25:57] John: You have to know what the center's job is. You have to know what the forward's job is. And if you just get five basketball players and they don't know what their position is, and you just say, Hey, team, just play. it's not gonna be the same as if you have a clear understanding of what each campaign is supposed to do.

[00:26:12] John: For example, if you just put videos into Performance Max, for whatever reason, they're not great videos. That doesn't mean Performance. Max is gonna make these videos better if you don't have your offer clarified and you just are basically writing headlines and ad copy without really understanding what drives your customers, what their pain points are, what's most valuable to them, and you just put these ads into Performance Max.

[00:26:34] John: Performance Max isn't gonna make that work. You still need to have your strategy. You still need to understand your market. And then Performance Max works on , the higher quality inputs. So the higher quality your creative assets, the higher quality, your headlines, the higher quality, your ad copy, the higher quality your display images, the higher quality your audience signals are the audiences you're targeting.

[00:26:55] John: All of those inputs really, really matter. and the website. Here's the other thing. Google did not tell us I mean, it's something that we know, but Google gonna come out and say, Hey, if you are gonna run Performance Max, you really wanna make sure you have a fast loading website.

[00:27:11] John: You wanna make sure you also have as much great content on your website. You wanna make your website is easily all those things that Google likes and websites, because Google whole business model was built on websites and performance Max is going to work so much better if you have an optimized site.

[00:27:28] John: So there's no button within the Google interface that says, optimize your website. Apply all . that's right. And we've also found some offers we have some clients who have certain offers. That work great with one landing page. so for Facebook ads, you can preframe this offer and YouTube ads, you can do the same thing.

[00:27:47] John: So you have a video, which is basically building up this expectation. What's gonna happen on this landing page that does not work so well for a performance max because you have all these other channels. When people are searching for something, they're in a very different mindset for when they're browsing social media or even watching videos on YouTube.

[00:28:03] John: So just having one landing page, having all these channels in performance max driving that one landing page generally doesn't work so well because Performance Max is going to take people where they're at and drive them to a particular point on a website based on how likely they're gonna convert or how that's gonna help them move to the next stage.

[00:28:21] John: that's one thing we found. , I just sort of the message here about I'd say Performance Max it could be an expensive way to find out your site is not great. Okay? this is what we were saying about Performance Max is not a magic bullet. It's amazingly powerful, but you also want to have these other pieces in place as well to really leverage it to its maximum potential.

[00:28:43] John: I have one more tip performance Max, if you want to win with this, I think this is a great time to hire a great issue agency or an expert on the team because you need to have your website sorted out. ahead. CI is also very important. Like if the traffic is getting onto the website, but you're not able to convert that traffic, then it's not gonna work either.

[00:29:05] John: you said hire an SEO expert, Santosh. Yes. Yes. Because this is a great time, and it's gonna serve you both ways. Like you're gonna improve your organic rankings, your website content speed and reliability, and user experience is going to improve and performance. Max is going to take all of that and help you make more money.

[00:29:26] John: You said, do or do not hire a CRO expert to help optimize your pages for conversion. R o done on the website is very important. Before start sending paid traffic to the website. That's what I wanted to say. Add, add to. Done. All right, so we're coming up into the busiest time of the advertising year.

[00:29:44] John: We've covered this a little bit on a, different customer acquisition show, but how are you guys thinking about positioning clients for Black Friday and Cyber Monday right now? Merchant Promotions, ? Yeah. Start now, Scott. I mean, this is the time to get all this in place. The big thing on the Google side is you want to get your promotions in Merchant Center.

[00:30:07] John: if you're e-commerce and you have products in Merchant Center, you wanna get those promotions set up and you want to have everything published, not turned on, but you want to have everything published bef at least, I would say, ideally a week before Black Friday, cyber Monday. Cuz if you run into any problems, there's support teams at both Google Ads and meta ads at Facebook ads.

[00:30:28] John: they are overwhelmed and you likely won't get a response for probably 48 hours if something goes wrong. have a countdown if you can on your website because in order to get the promotions approved, you have to have the offer clearly spelled out on the site.

[00:30:44] John: Google will check that. Otherwise they won't approve your promotion. So you wanna get all of those things in place and then you can sit back and watch the money roll in over the weekend and not have to worry . same. And also, if you've had like a very good strategy year long about acquiring new customers, now this would be the right time to milk in.

[00:31:07] John: Like having everything arranged and not focusing more towards test this, do this put your ducks in the road. Like we have the creatives around it. We have the videos around it and be prepared, that'd be my take. So think of it as like, acquire your customers now if possible, and then.

[00:31:26] John: Milk them more throughout the, rest of the season, not milk them. . Increase their lifetime value. retarget milk. Oh, that's milk them. So we have a question coming in from Ankit, I believe says video display keywords targeting is going away. Any thoughts? Santo? Hey, Anki by the way, solution set with me.

[00:31:45] John: I think Ankit knows my answer. You just need the validation. You just need like a shoulder to cry on . can't do anything about it. It's going away. It's . All right, so video display keyword targeting is going away. Yeah. And, and by the way, I just, I just need to say too, if anybody didn't know, Santosh is, is quite famous in the PPC world.

[00:32:08] John: He has great channel where he has lots of amazing Google Ads content. So just thought I'd point that out. Is that a YouTube channel? Yeah, that's a YouTube channel. And we are streaming this on that YouTube channel. It's called Guided ppc. So I'm Kip to answer your question. keywords are going away.

[00:32:26] John: But then there is lot you can do with building a solid conversion history and capitalizing on that with conversion focused, which strategies you know, go for conversions, conversion value, and that's where the whole Google Ads theme is headed. So you will see these you know, manual controls taken away in a.

[00:32:47] John: consistent and increasing way. So prepare for that . Yeah. I just for the people that aren't Google advertisers who are watching, , what is happening here? If I can explain this simply. So on YouTube , and using display as well, display images, we could target, and we still can, but this is going away. We can target people. So just say, I'm selling iPhones and I had a video talking about, you know, I'm selling these. , I could target people who have searched for iPhones in the last, say, 30 days and show them a video.

[00:33:19] John: Even if they go to YouTube and watch like a music video or some kind of documentary on elephants or something, I can show them an ad on about iPhones because they've been searching for that. So that is, that's a really powerful feature for YouTube ads and, and display ads. And now Google just said, oh yeah, we're taking that away.

[00:33:40] John: So . Okay. And it's like I said, it sucks. Nick, I'm thinking that it can maybe come back as an audience signal at some point if it's doing as a display keyword, it can come back as an audience. It'll come back as an audience signal. That's probably what's happening.

[00:33:57] John: It's probably gonna come back that's a great point. So I think. What may be happening, and this is just a guess, but instead of audience targeting, we're gonna have audience signals. So for YouTube still, yes. You'll be able to create audience signals just like we have in Performance Max.

[00:34:11] John: And that will be the starting point. Wow. It's a funny perspective that Google's taking, like, don't tell us exactly what you want. Tell us what you think and we'll do our own thing. . Right, exactly. , that basically what Google's been saying for the last two years is, we're smarter than you. We're gonna do it better. So give us the data and we'll just do it better than you can do it.

[00:34:32] John: And in some cases they're they're absolutely right. In other cases, there's still, you know, not quite there, but yeah, just not right yet. And they're also saying that we are having a bit of fun here. Remember app install campaigns, and which ones app install campaigns.

[00:34:47] John: . Now those are fully automated. So it's a great pun on Google saying, saying that, Hey, we did that with app install campaigns. We could very well do that with you know, all these search display shopping and performance max campaigns. We could just black out everything.

[00:35:02] John: So keep guessing . right. So one step close to like, not giving any controls to the advertisers, slowly and slowly, they're gonna take things away. If I'm not wrong, it's the content targeting in itself entirely, which is not taken away. It's gonna be taken away. Like targeting the placements, topic targeting, I think that's in a hole is going away, not just the keywords.

[00:35:26] John: All right. We have a lot of questions now. I know it's starting to pick up. Vlad Gonzalez, who was on our team He says, if you run two campaigns, how much budget do you allot to a p m max campaign versus a search campaign?

[00:35:39] John: Great question. Great question. I think on p m Max campaign, you're looking at $200 per day to start with, and on the search campaign, start with let's say 50. And depending upon search volume on the, on that campaign, on the keywords but start with 50, let's say. And you know, scale it up or down depending upon the no how the traction gets and conversions ands, of course.

[00:36:01] John: So you can start with these ideal models, 200 on bmax, 50 on search, and as you scale you can double down or cut down on what's working, what's not working. Thank you. Thanks a lot for the question. Up next we have waled Masud from LinkedIn who asked for Black Friday Cyber Monday. Would you change current assets or create a new campaign?

[00:36:24] John: As changing assets and working pmax campaigns can have an effect on learning your thoughts? Ooh, this is a really good one. Just run merchant promotions. That's all. , don't touch campaigns. . Yeah. This, now this, this is, and we have been discussing this internally and I think I agree because here's one thing I wouldn't add.

[00:36:47] John: New asset groups, now, by the way, this is likely going to be, unless you were a really, really early adopter, this is gonna be the first time. The majority of advertisers are running Performance Max for a Black Friday, cyber Monday, We know that adding new asset groups to a Performance Max campaign is going to throw it back into learning.

[00:37:06] John: We've seen that now. Changing assets, changing headlines, you know, swapping out low performing headlines, for example, for Black Friday, cyber Monday themed copy that likely won't throw things back into learning. So I think that would be safe to do. Santosh Rosner, you jump in here because again, this is new Black Friday, Saturday, Monday, it's, it's new territory.

[00:37:29] John: This is gonna be the first one for Performance Max. I would actually say what I would do is swap out some assets, just have some Black Friday assets in there, but don't add new asset groups. think I even heard John Moran's, at Solutions a recommend duplicating asset groups, pausing the evergreen and turning on.

[00:37:45] John: Black Friday, Saturday, Monday. I'd be very nervous to do that. I I mean, John's, he's amazing. That particular one. I'd be a little nervous to do that because if you throw a campaign back into learning on, say, Thursday night before Black Friday, then it takes three days at least to realign itself.

[00:38:03] John: It's, it's interesting. Yeah. So I think promotions, like Santosh said, promotions, promotions, you have promotion extensions, you have promotion Google Merchant Center promotions, make sure, they're on all your campaigns, just everywhere. You could increase budgets. Actually leading up to Black Friday, sort of Monday, you can increase budgets, say by 20%.

[00:38:22] John: So you give yourself some room for volume coming in. and make sure you're not limited by budget over the weekend. So that's something we're actually recommending for some clients to a week before us increase budget by 20%. So it's, quite different from Facebook where we have our Facebook teams ready.

[00:38:45] John: They have ads built campaigns, new campaigns ready to launch because they can take this extra budget and go and target and, you know, go into this Black Friday, cyber Monday frenzy and we see, can see these campaigns scaling and they'll scale. They'll increase budget every few hours if they see things taking off.

[00:39:07] John: It gets to that point, Google, if we try and do that, it's just not gonna work in the same way. So I wouldn't add new campaigns. that's my take. with that, I just wanna add is like overall, if you look at it, that would be the good strategy, but it also depends on answering a couple more questions.

[00:39:25] John: Like what's the budget, like, how long are you gonna be doing the sale, is it really unique sale? Or like, there's so many situations that you need to answer. It's just, just like if you don't have a huge budget and you would wanna like, you know, wreck your existing $200 campaign performance max with, by adding a new asset group, you would rather on a small retargeting campaign.

[00:39:47] John: So it also, you know, answering those questions regarding the budget, how long it's gonna go, is it the sale unique, is it applicable on all the products? Is it site-wide? Is it only applicable the sale on like, let's say five products out of 10? So answering then and then strategizing, it would be a better.

[00:40:07] John: take in my opinion. Then just, you know, thinking about, oh, black cyber black Friday, cyber Monday is coming up. Let me do something about it and just go do something on the Performance Max campaign. I would, yeah, I agree with Nick. That would be your strategy, right? Because if you have your promotion set up and your promotion extensions, wherever your search Adss show, there's going to be a very clear Black Friday sale with the offer.

[00:40:34] John: and testing new cyber Monday creatives on a separate duty YouTube campaign display retargeting. What are you doing right? Is have a more control over it. So I think adding a new asset group, I, I don't really think has a good idea. That's a great point. If you are going after coal traffic top of funnel, Then YouTube outbound display launch those campaigns.

[00:40:59] John: Because this is the thing, the people, there are people for Black Fridays on Monday who wait all year for this weekend. They have money to spend. They're gonna be searching for what they want with high intent. So if you have those products and you have your promotion set up, then you're gonna be competing in the search auctions and your offer's gonna be displayed.

[00:41:20] John: Now the Facebook side awareness, a lot of the traffic can be new customers. So it's going after somebody may never have heard of a business, but they say, black Friday sale, we have this right here, and it's on sale right now, 20% off or whatever it is. You can do that same thing on YouTube without having to use Performance Max for that.

[00:41:42] John: Yeah. And you have relevant message for the. Targeted audience and you have control over that. What message do you wanna deliver, which your audience? So I think separate strategies more suited for Black Friday Cyber Monday than just making changes on the existing Performance Max campaign. I have a slightly different take on this. think about this. When in events like Black Fighters Cyber Monday, have you ever witnessed that the campaigns were running on Google ads and they did not get the clicks, or they get lesser clicks? Probably that's not the case.

[00:42:15] John: Your campaigns, whether you run promotions or not, are still going to get clicks. What changes is now is that on your website, you have to convert more of those visitors into customers, therefore, , I wouldn't change anything on the campaigns or launch new campaign because two things is gonna happen. One is gonna, you're gonna disrupt the learning on your existing campaign, or if you build new campaigns, you're going to build learning for this small period of time that you can't use for the rest of the year.

[00:42:45] John: don't do either of those. Try and focus on highlighting your promotions on the website, on the landing pages and landing pages where every product pay for an e-commerce website is a landing page, because that's where people land from shopping campaign, from even Performance Max, when they get get to see the shopping ads and go on your website.

[00:43:02] John: So run those promotions there. On Google Ads side of things, Three things you can do, run a merchant promotion, and there are ways around it. Even you can do a free shipping ads promotion and absolute discount percentage discounters are all great options. Run ad extensions at Max Price extension, but I wouldn't recommend touching the campaigns.

[00:43:21] John: That's my take on it. ? All right. since this is first year for Black Friday, cyber Monday, are you guys planning on testing some of these other things even if you have low confidence in them?

[00:43:31] John: Now here's the thing about Performance Max is I hear that experiments are coming for Performance Max, but a lot of things in Performance Max, we actually we don't like to test things. I wouldn't be looking to test new things for this in very important weekend.

[00:43:47] John: Really what we're trying to do is take everything we know about Google Ads and maximize success for our clients. . So there's certain things which if they're really risky, I mean, we might discuss with the client and we might say, Hey, this is what we could test. We don't know how it's gonna work, but if we do test this we'll know and we'd, absolutely work very closely with the client there.

[00:44:06] John: But just testing things, in such an important weekend with so much traffic and so much volume that could potentially tank performance, we'd be very careful of testing that. And that's the thing about Performance Max. Every other Google ad campaign type, you can run split test experiments.

[00:44:22] John: Performance Max, not so much testing on Performance Max if you started and actually wait for the real data to come through. I think we'll be looking after 23. Right. Would be gone. so for the amateur Google Advertiser, like myself, the way I should be thinking about Black Friday, cyber Monday, and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, is to slowly increase the budget of my Performance Max campaigns leading up to Black Friday, separate Monday, build search campaigns that are around the offers since people are likely to be searching for my brand or the product on sale.

[00:44:56] John: And then start thinking like top of funnel, like cold traffic for here's my cool product. And the discount for like YouTube. Yeah. And extensions. Extensions. Extensions. So extensions are the little snippets, little add-ons that you see under the main ads. Okay. And make sure those are all set up. You can set those up without affecting campaign performance.

[00:45:20] John: Basically, it's just gonna make the offer really clear. It's gonna show next to ads and then in Google Merchant Center, which is where all your products live. , you wanna set your promotion up there because then when your product show, the offer is gonna be really clear under the product as well. So there's ways you can make it unmissable that you're running a Black Friday sale without having to go in a performance max and tinker with it and try and change a lot of things which could tank it.

[00:45:45] John: That's one of our golden rules here, right? don't touch anything that's working or don't turn anything off that's working, I think is what it's exactly. Yeah. In the words of Kobe, it's no touchy . No touchy. Yeah. It's about not pressing the buttons that you know you shouldn't press.

[00:45:58] John: Yeah. Yeah. With performance, max. Great. Well, I think that's a great way to end it here. I enjoy these conversations and I think we're planning on doing these on a monthly basis, but if you guys wanna do more often, we're definitely down for that. So everybody, thank you for watching the Customer Acquisition show.

[00:46:13] John: If you wanna learn more about Tier 11 and some of the services we offer, whether it's Google Ads, performance Max meta advertising we have after the click website building and c r o through conversion architecture and some other services as well. Go to tier eleven.com. Santosh Rashna. Nick, thank you very much.

[00:46:30] John: This has been a lot of fun and I can't wait till we do it again. I think we'll probably get one more in before Black Friday, cyber Monday, but at that point it might be too late to do much .