Performance Max campaigns are Google’s way of selling you shitty inventory that you normally wouldn’t want.
Performance Max is a giant ball of shit, and here is why:
It mixes Brand and Non-Brand Search Terms
Mixing Brand and Non-Brand search performance is a typical digital marketing scam to make things look better than they are. Google is using your high revenue low cost brand searches to subsidize the non-performing garbage it’s serving you.
You might be wise to this, and so you can explicitly exclude your Brand terms from PMax, but now what? How do you defend your Brand search from competitors? Most likely by creating a search and 3-tier Shopping campaign structure — The same you would have done if you weren’t running PMax in the first place.
So now you’re managing PMax AND shopping…
Limited Keyword Data
Standard Shopping is a treasure trove of keyword performance data. You can tell exactly what search term generated your revenue, and you can hyper focus on that term to grow your brand.
PMax, on the otherhand, is an opaque dark hole of shit and vagueness. You can see some data on what broad search term “theme” generated sales, but you can’t see how much you paid for those sales. You can’t tell what was profitable, and what was a spectacular failure.
Difficult to Scale Intelligently
The only lever you have with PMax is your budget. You can spend more or less, and that’s basically it.
With a small budget on PMax, you’re just targeting your Brand keywords on the search & shopping network.
As your budget increases, PMax begins to target your top performing generic searches, still on the search & shopping network.
As you scale your budget higher, PMax starts to dip into some overly broad and shitty generic search terms, and starts to expand into the Display Network, YouTube, and Discovery.
At this point, performance begins to drop. But you often can’t tell, because so much revenue is being generated by your Branded search.
As you scale further, all that extra budget goes into super shitty broad search terms, and super shitty inventory on Display network, YouTube, Discovery, etc… And Surprise! Your performance tanks!
How do you Optimize when things go bad?
When things are going good, and your business is growing, you might not care too much about PMax wasting your money. Things are going good, so why mess with it? Maybe Google’s AI Algorithm really *IS* on your side and is doing something good for your business?
But when things start going bad, and your business is losing money, and you need to cut costs, how do you optimize your PMax spend? Your only lever is budget. You don’t have the option to cut your losers and focus on your winners. All you can do is reduce the budget and hope.
How do you capitalize on Growth opportunities?
The way you grow your brand on Google is by finding non-brand profitable keyword niches, hyper focusing on them, and getting your product into the hands of new previously brand-unaware customers.
With standard search and shopping, you can do that.
But with PMax, you can’t really tell what keywords you’re actually converting on not how much they cost. You get some vague ideas, but nothing concrete. Nothing you can trust, and nothing you can really use to optimize or focus your business.
Wasting Money
…on Garbage Keywords
PMax and Google’s super smart AI bidding algorithm is constantly making stupid bids, on stupid search terms that a reasonable human would never bid on.
Google’s “Smart” bidding algorithm will regularly and happily bid $100/click for a product that only sells for $25. It will do this all day long…
…on your Domain Name
If you don’t have your Brand excluded, rest assured that PMax will make spectacularly rediculous bids on your own domain name.
I’ve frequenly seen Google make bids of $100+ per click for people typing in “www.yourdomain.com”.
Google: “That’s high intent and a guaranteed sale! Let’s bid $100! While we’re at it, lets also make all competitors bid $99.99!”
Ad Heretic 