Take back control of your spending in Google Ads and make the system work harder to find new customers and grow your business.
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Take back control of your spending in Google Ads and make the system work harder to find new customers and grow your business.
Since Google Performance Max launched in 2021, our team has been figuring out how to use it best to help our clients grow.
Running a successful Google Ads account for a scaling brand in 2024 requires a fraction of the daily manual inputs compared to even a few years ago. This is all thanks to the increased automation of products in Google’s repertoire. Even though we’re changing things less on a daily basis, the changes we do make are having a greater impact. To the untrained eye, It is becoming less and less clear which buttons to click, which recommendations to accept and which settings to toggle. In this post we’ll focus on Performance Max (Google’s latest and greatest double-edged sword) specifically, sharing some tips to help make your money work as hard as possible in Google Ads to help grow your brand.
Performance Max is a highly automated campaign type that can be a great way to drive new customers through Google, but if you don’t get reins on it you’re likely to be burning a lot of cash. We often audit Google Ads accounts and find that the vast majority of PMax spend and revenue is driven through brand searches on shopping placements. These searches are naturally going to have the highest purchase intent and therefore Performance Max will go after them with everything it’s got to drive its “performance” to the “max” (apologies). That will often mean you are simply inflating the CPC for these terms in the shopping space. Take into account also that the incremental value of showing ads for brand searches is likely to be lower, your PMax campaign has probably got a nice ROAS on the surface but is unlikely to be actually driving new customer growth for your brand. Here are our recommendations to make PMax work harder:
We work with a leading UK health and supplement company, and since taking the above steps with them we’ve seen far more efficient new customer growth. When we excluded brand from Performance Max, average daily spend on the campaign reduced 50%. At the same time, we were able to achieve over a 95% impression share on these brand terms through our controlled brand shopping campaign for a mere 10% of the initial PMax daily spend. Thus by taking the steps above, we were able to maintain stable revenue and brand visibility whilst spending 40% less per day. This was a huge win and shows just how much PMax can inflate brand CPC, we were able to re-invest that saved daily spend into other upper-funnel activity to help drive new customer growth.