Google AI Max: Why 99% of Businesses Will Lose Money (Setup + Results)

AI Max for search is here. It is available as a setting now in search campaigns we at grow my ads have over a hundred clients. We have been testing this where it makes sense for our clients. I wanted to show you a real campaign that I have a test running. What I'm seeing how AI Max appears to be working in an actual campaign inside of an actual account. And then I've got recommendations on how to use AI Max or at least how to test it if you haven't tested AI Max yet. So let's dive in. Okay, before we dive into a real account, real quick, what is aimax? Just in case you don't know, it is basically two main features, search term matching and then also asset optimization. And so I did a video already when they first came out with AI Max where I gave my initial thoughts on it. That video will be in the description below. You don't necessarily need to go watch that because you're going to get a lot of good stuff just in this video. But here's what is available with aimax and it's a setting now at the campaign level. Again, I'm going to show you all this in a real account. But from my perspective, what they have done is taken technology that already exists, such as DSA technology, and automatically created assets and they've just basically packaged it into a quick, easy toggle button that you can turn on or off on a campaign. It also, when you turn it on, pretty much forces you into broad match technology with your keywords. So if you're running a campaign that's exact in phrase that no longer it will expand into like broad match technology, which is what they're calling keyword list technology, which is a tad vague. But here's the features available in AI Max according to Google's support doc here. Okay, Text customization. This is literally automatically created assets. So this is Google using your landing page copy and and creating assets like headlines and descriptions based off of the context that's on your on your pages. Final URL expansion. This is Google just having the ability to send traffic to landing pages that it might think will perform better. That's DSA technology that's already existed. Location of interest. This is different. I'm not going to talk too much about this, but this allows you at an ad group level to change the location targeting. So let's say you're in Los Angeles, but you also want to target people who are not in Los Angeles and they would be searching for, you know, your store or service in la. So you know, maybe it's someone who's coming to visit Los Angeles from out of town and they want to know the best steakhouse. So this would allow you to have like ad group level control where you could actually target the US for people looking for restaurants in LA versus needing to do like separate campaigns there. So this is quite interesting, but I'm not really running tests there quite yet. There's some brand setting stuff. So this is existed though with inclusions and exclusions. So you can include only brands at ad group level. Now the ad group level piece there is new and then brand exclusions, which is where you can exclude your brand from the campaign level, which is nice and good setting to have. Then they have URL inclusions exclusions. I'll talk a little bit about that in the ad actual campaign itself when I'm like going through it. But again like these features are none of this is like that new. It's like, hey, basically if you turn it on, you're allowing Google to tap into broad match keyword targeting technology and then you are allowing Google to send the traffic to landing pages that it wants and you're allowing Google to create ad copy as well or assets, right? So that is again technology that has existed before. They just have like packaged it into this shiny new feature called AI Max, which obviously everyone loves the word AI today. It's great marketing. I love it. I love it so much. So I've been testing this, right? And Google is usually good at like releasing new features that suck in the beginning and then get good later on. But I always like to test in the beginning and I figured my tests wouldn't be great and in the beginning with this. And I was right because I've tested this a lot on a lot of accounts and I just have not seen great results yet. So let me dive into that actual account and an actual campaign. Just show you what I'm seeing. Okay, so I'm inside of an actual account. I'm at the campaign settings of a search campaign. And if you come down now, you're going to see this AI Max for search campaign setting. They take up a ton of real estate to put it in front of your face, right? All you do is you click this button. I'm not going to turn mine off, but you just click that to blue, right? This now will optimize your campaign with AI Max. Then it automatically will have you set for final URL expansion and then text customization again. What does text customization mean? It just means you're allowing Google to create headlines and descriptions for your ads. And then final URL expansion is allowing Google to send traffic to pages that it thinks will perform better versus the final URL of maybe your text ad inside of that ad group. So I do like you can actually control this. You can turn off text customization, you can turn off final URL. What does, what happens when you turn those off? Basically you're just tapped into essentially Broad Match keyword technology at that point. But I have been running this campaign with text customization on. I did have final URL expansion on in the beginning. I just was not liking the pages it was starting to send to. And then you have to kind of come through and start excluding URLs. And I just didn't want to go through that hassle. And my page is already like high converting for this campaign, so I just turned that off. So right now if you come in and you click that and let's say you have both these on, here's what's going to happen and, and again, I'll show you what mine looks like without the final URL expansion on. You're going to turn it on and you're like, okay, what now? Because nothing, it doesn't build a new ad group. You're not going to see like new Aimax like keyword signals or something going on at the keyword level. But what will start happening, you have to keep an eye out on this is if you go into Search Terms, then there we go. So it fired, right? These are now the search terms for my actual keywords that I'm targeting in this campaign, right? And I am using Broad Match keywords along with Exact match in this specific account account. So I was already tapped into Broad Match, you know, technology. But this is my normal keywords. If you come up to this Search Terms tab here and then you click down, you can now see search terms and landing pages from aimax. So if we click into this, this will actually show us what is firing under the AI Max setting being turned on. This is where it's pretty interesting right now. So here's what I'm starting to see. And this is again, I'm, I'm letting this run for a while. I'm going to give this quite some time just to figure out I have the ability to do that with this campaign. Other campaigns we've tested on, we've turned it off quite a bit. And again, I'm not saying AI Max is bad. I, I, I'm still neutral on my feeling towards it. I just feel like it hasn't been great yet. It probably will get really good over the next year. But so far my results have been subpar. This is what, this is what I'm seeing right now. So our search terms we started showing for home. This is a sectional furniture company and the word home I have no, I was even trying to figure out, like, is this like some weird thing they're missing? It's like glitching. Not showing me the entire phrase of what the search term is, but it just came in as home. So I added an exact negative match keyword home to prevent that. And so I think like, if I go to yesterday, it probably doesn't show. Yeah, like home doesn't pop up anymore. And so now there's still some weird stuff like homemakers. I don't know what that really is. And then just really, really bad stuff that is coming in here now. There's some good stuff too. But a lot of the good stuff I'm getting already from my current keyword targeting because I'm already using Broad Match and I'm on smart bidding and things are working really well for this campaign. And so I was turning this on to an already high performing campaign. But here's some things I didn't like. So I didn't like this home. I also found some weird searches like, and this I thought was bizarre. So Buy England Furniture Online. This is a furniture business that is American made and look at the headline, Made in usa and it matched us with Buy England Furniture Online. That is absolutely insane. And so thankfully I don't, I didn't actually get like a full click on it, but this just popped up in the search term results. So what I'm getting clicks on is some of it's really generic and then the other stuff I've been getting clicks on. Clicks on is weird because I actually have already received clicks or conversions from that type of stuff from my regular keyword targeting because I am using broad match here. So I have not been fully impressed. The headlines have been okay. Like some of them, they're doing a good job. Like, here's our home reserve. Made in usa. Easy, clean washable fabrics. Not bad Home reserve Made for action kids and pets. This is, this is copy that we actually use in our other ads from our ad groups running in this campaign. So I'm okay with some of this now. Some of it's really bad. Like Made in USA when someone was looking up England furniture that made absolutely zero sense. Made in USA as the only headline here doesn't make in any sense. I, I'M not really sure what's going on. And somehow the search term here is made in home, so there's a lot of mismatch stuff going on here. You know, I probably will turn this off eventually. I'm going to let this run just a little further, but I probably will end up turning that off. But that's all it is. It's basically a campaign setting that you turn on and that's what it's going to do. So it doesn't like go create new things inside of like the ad groups that you have or the keywords that you're already targeting in those ad groups. It almost runs in the background. And then you got to go into the search term report filter to look at the AMX landing pages and search terms to see what assets creating to see what search terms it's showing for to see what final URLs it's actually sending traffic to. I want to show you a slide real quick on a presentation I'm doing with my recommendations based off of lots of testing. I mean this is one account I tested on, but I'm going to give you my recommendations based off of the collective effort here at Grow My Ads from us testing this with lots of accounts. Okay, so this is a webinar series I'm doing or a webinar I suppose, with Channable, the feed company in Europe. And I'm doing the webinar on search, not just on AI Max, on everything to do with how to continue to actually use search campaigns in 2025 since a lot of people have gotten lazy on that. However, here's my slide on AI Max recommendations. So what I have found or what we have found here at Grow My Ads, it works well with larger accounts already using lots of Broad Match keywords. So we have found large accounts with lots of volume. It does seem to do fine with now. My only issue is it doesn't seem to really expand too much from what Broad Match was already getting. So it's not like I've seen massive gains from it. Even on the large accounts where you have lots of volume, smaller accounts that are not using Broad Match yet, I am saying avoid it if you're not using Broad Match successfully, AI Max is probably not going to work yet. Tap into Broad Match first. See if you can get Broad Match working. I have a video on when and how to use Broad Match keywords by the way. That video will be in the description below if you want to learn more about that. But smaller accounts. I am not recommending AI Max 2 yet. Then if you're going to test it, I Recommend Running a 5050 experiment. So split the campaign you want to test it on. Split the traffic through a campaign experiment. 50% goes to the current structure with no AI max. 50% then goes to your campaign experiment shell structure where AI max is actually on. So that is the conservative way of approaching it. Larger accounts. I'll just flick it on medium sized accounts where my risk tolerance is not as high. Then I will do a 5050 experiment. But that's normally what I'm recommending to people. Just run it in an experiment. You can do it and it's a clean way of doing it. Then make sure to keep an eye out on landing pages, search terms and ad copy. Just like I showed you in that real account. There's a lot of garbage that is going to come in and I don't care what technology is being used. Like I do know with Broad Match, you know, there will be terms that convert that you're like, how did that convert? That doesn't make sense. But it does because it's tapped into all the intent signals. Listen, someone searching for Buy England furniture online is not buying that furniture that's made in America that I just showed you. That is just stupid, right? So, so stupid. So I am, I'm taking that out, right? And I'm not going to allow Google to keep showing me for, for terms that people are searching for English furniture or furniture in England when it's made in America furniture here. So have some intuition there with your account and what Google Google is showing. Don't try to get too crazy though. I do recommend let it run for a few weeks without touching too much. So obvious stupid things like Buy England furniture online for a Made in America furniture company. Yeah, negate that out. But try not to make any rash decisions. Let it run for a few weeks, see what the data shows and then reassess after having lots of click data. But try to let it learn and calibrate itself because on the accounts where it does work, that's we just the first week or two are going to be choppy and then it seems to get itself going. Now what we do then is take those search terms that maybe we missed or aren't really bidding on that AI Max was picking up and we actually start building that into our search campaign structures now. So we're building those keywords into the ad groups or we build new ad groups based off of the themes that those search terms match. So I'm not letting AI Max just Take over. I'm actually now utilizing it as continued a mining feature and then taking the successful stuff and still trying to manually build that out within my campaign processes. There you go. There's my findings so far with using and testing AI Max. I will say, listen, I'm not here to like say it doesn't work, never use it. Just saw my recommendations on it, test it, be conservative about it and give it some time to actually find its groove. So don't turn it on for a few days, say this thing doesn't work and then turn it off, give it a couple of weeks. So you have to have the risk tolerance for that, but you've got to give it time. I will say I'm not that impressed by it so far. Here's the thing though. Google releases new things, I'm usually not impressed in the beginning, fast forward a year later and I'm usually using those new features and technologies. Right? That's how Performance Max was. That's how smart bidding was back in the day. That's how broad match keywords was. So I'm probably going to be using AI Max at some point more often. It's just right now it's not the greatest. However, we will continue to test, test, test, test, test until we start seeing data that's proving okay, this is actually starting to work wonderfully. It's the unfortunate part, a lot of times Google releases new technology and then that technology has to learn off of Advert. That's why it gets better, because all these advertisers start tapping into it because their Google reps are saying, hey go, you need to be using this new AI Max feature. It may not be great at first, but then it gets like trillions of data points from all of the advertisers that start using it and then it gets really good. So I bet AMX will be pretty good a year from now, maybe even sooner. Right now I'm not that impressed. But I'm not saying don't test it and I'm not saying this will never work. So if you're going to test, do a 5050 experiment or be, you know, cautious with your test on it, keep an eye out on it and have a risk tolerance for allowing it to at least run for several weeks before making any RAS decisions. I hope you got good value from this. I'll see you on the next video.