Google Ads Performance Max Issues

Many companies have gone all in on Google's new campaign type being performance max campaigns. Now I'm not saying that performance max campaigns are bad. I just want to make it very, very clear that performance max campaigns function in a very specific way and they have some limitations that you need to be aware of if you're going to have success and profit with your performance max campaigns. So in this video I'm going to share with you how how performance max campaigns work, what their limitations are and how you need to correctly use them so that you can have success and profit with performance max campaigns in your Google Ads account. But before we get into today's teaching about performance max campaigns, if we haven't met yet, my name is Aaron Young and I'm your 15,000 hour Google Ads Master. And I've been creating and optimizing profitable Google Ads campaigns to since 2010 when I launched my own business through Google Ads. And then since 2016 managing Google Ads has become my business because I create and optimize profitable Google Ads campaigns for multiple brands from all over the world. And in this journey I've learned valuable lessons about how Google Ads actually works and how you need to set up and optimize and structure your Google Ads campaigns in the correct way in order for you to be able to make profit with Google Ads. You can. Because unfortunately it's not as simple as just setting up a performance max campaign and letting Google do all of the work you need to make sure it's set correctly. And that's why I've actually set up my Google Ads 10X community. And this is a community where I share live Monthly teachings which are advanced teachings which I don't share here on my YouTube channel. And also I run group coaching and live Q and A calls. And this actually gives you an opportunity to for you to ask any questions where I'll answer them in real life examples. And then finally You've got a 24 hour Google Ads community where you can jump in and ask questions at any time and have people from all over the world answer your questions and give their own experiences for any challenges or questions that you have in Google Ads. And if you would like to pre register and join right now, all you need to do is to follow the link in the description you so that you can get access to my Google Ads community. I really hope to see you in that Google Ads community very very soon. But with all that said right now let's get into today's teaching where we discuss Google's performance max campaigns and some of the issues that people are having with them. And the first thing you need to understand is how performance max campaigns actually work. And they're one campaign which then distributes your ads to all of the different Google Ads networks, so including search and display shopping, Google Maps, gmail, and also YouTube. And while that functionality sounds great in theory, there are some issues that you need to be aware of if you're going to see success with your performance max campaigns. And the first thing you need to understand is that if you launch a performance max campaign in your Google account, it will become your priority campaign. And what I mean by that is that Google will prioritize spending in your performance max campaign over other campaigns, even if they've got a higher budget and even if they've got better conversion metrics, like higher conversion rates, more conversion value, or lower cost per conversion or acquisition costs. And right now, let me show you an example of what I mean by this. And at the moment, I just want you to have a look at these top two campaigns. So these ones highlighted in blue right here. And we've got a performance max campaign and a search campaign. Now, what you can see through here is, is that the search campaign actually has a budget of $1,000 a day, and the performance max campaign only has a budget of $200 a day. But if you scroll across, what you can actually see here is that the performance max campaign is actually spending more than the search campaign. But this is where it then starts to get really scary, is that you can actually see that the performance max campaign has a cost per conversion, which is more than double than the search campaign. So the cost per conversion of the performance max it is at $11.46, whereas in the search campaign, it at $4.05. And then when we move over to the conversion value, you can actually see that the search campaign has more than doubled the total conversion value of the performance max campaign, with the performance max campaign getting just over 34,000 versus the search campaign with over 70,000. And then when we look at this ROAS score, you can see once again, the search campaign has a ROAS of $24, and this Performance Max campaign has a ROAS of $8.80. So in all of the important metrics here, including your budget, so this account had set up for more budget to be spent in the search campaign, and it also had better conversion metrics. But Google still prioritized the performance max campaign. And that's what we mean by a priority campaign. Even with lower results and poorer results, Google still prioritizes this campaign so that it has a total spend which is higher than your other campaigns. And this leads us to the second issue with performance max campaigns. And in that I find that performance max campaigns do not play nicely with other types of campaigns in Google Ads. And what I mean by that is that if you've got a performance max campaign, which is targeting the same keywords and products as other search or shopping campaigns, is that your search and shopping campaigns will actually have a lower performance. And this has been quite a common problem over the past couple of months where people had some really high performing search and shopping campaigns and, and then they launched a performance max campaign only to find that the results in their search and shopping campaigns went down and that the new performance max campaign is not performing to the same level of what your previous shopping and search campaigns were doing. So if you are going to launch any performance max campaigns, you just need to be really, really aware. The historically search and shopping campaigns would work really well together for Ecom stores. And the reason for this is that the shopping ads would really drive those impressions and although really good at qualifying people on your price, and then the search campaigns would be a really good backup because it allowed you to use the extra headlines and descriptions to pull out some unique selling points that you couldn't do in a shopping campaign. And then for service based industries for a long time, search campaigns coupled with display campaigns have been the winning formula. And, and the reason for that is because in this case, your search campaigns would really drive those initial touch points through targeted search queries. And then after that you could remarket or retarget those users through a display campaign, allowing them to continue to see your ads until they complete that conversion action. But that doesn't happen with performance Max because as I said at the start of this video, you need to remember that performance max is an all in campaign, meaning that as soon as you press go on that campaign, you've got search, shopping, display, Google maps, Gmail and YouTube all working. And as I showed you in the example before, with performance Max it takes the priority spot. So if you've got some really good performing search campaigns that will be overtaken and prioritized by your performance max campaign. And then leading into this, which comes to our third issue with performance max campaigns is that they are a smart campaign in that Google has control and not you. Now historically I haven't been the biggest fan of smart campaigns and the reason for that is because I've always found that we've got better results through the Google Ads Manager being able to correctly optimize and also add in extra negative keywords or exclusions for parts of the campaign that aren't performing well. And smart campaigns just did not allow you to do that. Now, performance max campaigns do have some elements where you can create some ad copy. You can also add in specific images and videos to help your campaign. But where it lacks, and this is why it's still a smart campaign, is that you're not allowed to add in some extra negative keywords and you don't even see the full search term audit. So you don't even know all of the search terms which your ads are appearing on and you can't even exclude different audiences. Now, I know when it comes to audiences, most people would just be using the observation method. But even with search and display campaigns, even if you're using the observation method, you can still exclude certain audiences which you know are not performing well, whereas you do not have that option with performance max campaigns. And then on top of this, when you do create your asset groups and performance max, yes, you can add in some different keywords that you want to target. However, these are added as broad match keywords, meaning that your ads could appear for any related or any similar search terms which Google deems could or potentially could provide you some conversions. So this means that your keywords could appear for search terms that include the words free or include the words discount codes or cheap words that you know are not the type of keyword phrases that you want to be targeting for your Google search campaign. And Google doesn't hide this fact. They do actually make it very, very clear. When you do actually go through and set up your campaign, they do give you that disclaimer. Once again, it's in a green box. I think it should be in a red box as a warning, letting you know that even though you've added in this targeting of keywords and audiences, Google will go beyond your selections to try and find some more conversions. So now that you know the three core issues with performance max campaigns, if you do want to start these campaigns, and I do actually agree that performance max campaigns can be a successful addition to a profitable Google Ads account. And in fact I'm rolling them out across a lot of my E Commerce Store campaigns that I'm running, however, I do need to make some things very, very clear. And the first one is, is that you do not want to be running a performance max campaign which is targeting similar products and keywords where you already have successful search and shopping campaigns. If that is the case, I would keep those campaigns running because you don't want your Performance Max campaigns to ruin those high performing campaigns search and shopping campaigns. And then secondly, if you are going to use Performance Max campaigns, make sure that you set up individual asset groups. Now I do know that this takes a little bit more time, but the benefits of this is that that way you're at least able to actually target specific headlines and descriptions in your ad copies. Also use specific product images or sales and marketing images for those particular products and services which you are targeting. So one thing that you do not want to do is just run a catch all Performance Max campaign because I've never seen them perform well so far. And then finally you may want to test turning off the URL expansion in the Settings section of your Performance Max campaign set up. And what this actually does is that this stops Google from going through all of your website and testing out different landing pages which you know are not going to be successful. And while I'm here to confirm this, it will actually help to limit the some of those unrelated keywords because Google is not bringing in the headings and the titles from all of the pages across your whole website. Now that you're aware of the potential issues with Performance Max campaigns, if you would like to learn more about how you can actually optimize Performance Max campaigns, I want you to go through and watch this video right here. Or if you want to make sure that you've actually set up your Performance Max campaign correctly, I want you to go through and watch this video right here. Once again, thanks for joining me and I'd love to see you in my Google Ads 10X community which you can pre register and sign up right now by following the link in the description. See ya.