NEW Google Ads Update (This Changes Performance Max)

All right, Google just came out with a Performance Max campaign update that influences how your products are shown. If you're running Standard Shopping and Performance Max, this could be a big change. I don't know. We're all still feeling it out. I'm going to give you a breakdown of what the change is, what you should be looking for in your account, and what you should be changing in your account to better prepare for this. Let's dive in. Okay, so the change Google is now making, and they're saying this is starting in October of 2024, gradually launching. I don't know what that means, so I don't know if you're going to get notified in your account or not. This was kind of a quiet update. And that's kind of odd how they actually did this, especially right before the holidays. However, with that said, what they're saying is any overlapping campaigns of Performance Max and Standard Shopping. So if you have the same product that lives in Performance Max and the same product that lives in Standard Shopping, it used to be, before this change, Performance Max always won. So priority always was given to Performance Max. However, that is no longer the case. So Google is saying for these overlapping campaigns, instead of pmax automatically being prioritized over Standard Shopping, normal auction dynamics will now apply and the campaign with the highest Ad rank will. Will serve. So that brings Performance Max and Standard Shopping on equal grounds in regards to priority. And what would win is Ad Rank. Okay, what does that mean and how does that influence your campaigns? What does that mean? Well, right now, if you're currently running a Standard shopping campaign alongside a Performance Max campaign, pmax used to obviously take priority. So your product ads would automatically be firing there. And now it's going to be with Ad Rank. But what, what does that mean with Ad Rank? Well, that means highest bid, right? So somehow, if you have a higher, more aggressive bid strategy on a Standard shopping campaign right now, and it's running in there along with a pmax campaign you're running, you could actually now get more shopping ad clicks and impressions for that product in your Standard shopping campaign versus your Performance Max campaign. And that is due to the fact if it's the same product and it lives in pmax and it lives in Standard Shopping, Ad Rank is only going to be an influence then of your actual bid strategy. So if it's a more aggressive bid in the standard shopping campaign, it actually will be out Performance Max. Now, the way I operate my Performance Max campaign structures, this may not really have that much of an influence. So a lot of times I am running one what looks like this and it's a best sellers PMAX campaign and then a standard shopping hybrid. But you'll notice in my Bestseller Shopping or Performance Max campaign, I only am running bestsellers, right? By the way, this is all taught in my Performance Max course which is free. You can get access to that course for free in the description below. It's our free school community is where it's hosted. So go just check that out if you want to learn more about the Performance Max course. But this is a structure I love running and basically you'll see I am running a hybrid. So I have PMAX alongside Standard Shopping, but I actually am excluding those bestsellers. So I don't really have overlap a lot of times with products. So I normally am not running the same product in a shopping campaign as I am in a PMAX campaign. There are accounts that I have seen that are and this would impact those accounts. The way I structure my campaigns with with shopping ads, with Living with Performance Max and Standard Shopping, I don't actually see in this influencing too much of what I'm doing. However, I do want to share a real example of what I'm looking out for right now that could influence this. One thing that could change is if you're running Performance Max but then you negated your brand terms and then you're running a standard shopping campaign to pick up that brand traffic. And what you should be watching for is after this change, are you going to start getting a lot more non brand traffic firing in that brand shopping campaign? I have not seen that yet. I'm not too worried about it. So here's a real account I have. I have a PMAX campaign and then this shopping campaign is built to pick up brand search queries because I've negated brand from the Performance Max campaign. Now if you look, most of my search term traffic here is brand. So I'm actually not too concerned about this change right now. And so we'll see because I have small bids on my brand shopping campaign. So according to Google's definition, if it comes to ad rank, then my PMAX campaign actually absolutely would win for the non brand searches because I'm not running high bids in my brand shopping campaign structure. By the way, if the brand shopping campaign structure doesn't make sense to you or what I'm saying here, go watch the Performance Max course. I break it down in the course on how to actually set this up and what it all means. The other thing you should be concerned about freaking out if you have dormant campaigns, dormant shopping campaigns in your account, then those could come back to life. Right now it just depends on what bidding strategy you have or how high your bids are there. But if you have a messy account potentially, or you just have some old standard shopping campaigns that haven't done much but they are enabled in your account, go revisit those. Should they be enabled, yes or no? And what the heck is the strategy with them right now? It is possible that those products now are firing in the auctions because the bids there are high enough to actually outrank what you may have in your Performance Max campaign. Due to the definition of now, pmax and standard shopping being on equal grounds. And it's going to be ad rank that wins. All right, what is my overall take on all of this? I don't know. I'm actually not too concerned about it. If you're in the community and follow people on X and LinkedIn and Reddit or whatever, there's, there's a lot of noise about it at the moment. I don't, I don't think this is that big of a deal. If you follow my structures that I teach in the performance max course, I don't run overlapping products. Usually. I. If I'm running performance max campaigns, those products are not living in a standard shopping structure that I'm, I'm like competing against. It just, it's not how I run it. So I don't have a lot of overlap there. And if I do have overlap, it's because I have a Catch all running and I have a brand shopping campaign built. Those are unique strategies and my bid, my bid strategies on Catch all and brand are lower than what I'm bidding usually on my Performance Max campaigns. So I just don't think it actually will cause too much of an issue on how I currently run my accounts. Holidays are coming up. If you're watching this, I've launched this in October of 2024. Should you be doing anything? Probably not. I don't think you should be changing too much within your accounts other than reviewing your dormant standard shopping campaigns, if you have any, and then keeping an eye out if you're running the brand or the branded standard shopping campaign that I showed. Make sure, just keep an eye out on the search queries that are starting to come into that campaign over time and just make sure you don't get a bunch of non brand stuff going on in there. Otherwise I really don't think this is that big of a deal yet. One thing I am testing now, or will be testing is maybe I can move more to Standard Shopping. You know, right now we have found if I have well optimized standard shopping campaigns, most cases if I move to utilizing and testing Performance Max campaigns, we do get lift. However, in the future, especially with this change, maybe I can resort back to more of Standard Shopping and less of Performance Max. We'll see. These are tests though that I do plan on making and I have been testing actually doing this before this change in some of our other accounts. I prefer Standard Shopping over pmax in regards to the control and the insight data. But Google absolutely wants to continue to move forward with Performance Max and they absolutely want you spending your money there. They are doing a better job of giving you further insights on Performance Max campaigns, but we'll see. This also does erase the idea that all other campaign types in the future are going to go away and it's going to be a Performance max only world. I think this change by Google shows no, we still will have standard shopping in the future, which I'm super excited for and happy about. So that at the moment kills this whole conspiracy that Google is just going to force everyone into one campaign type under Performance Max. I do not believe that to be the case and I am very happy about that. And this change by them seems to indicate that we will have all the campaign types still, at least in the near future. Hey, somewhere on this screen is going to be the video to the Performance Max course. I actually do have this on the YouTube channel as well. Again, if you want to just join our free community called PPC Launchpad that is in the description below and the whole course is broken out in a very easy way to follow in our school group and you get the notion doc with it. However, if you just want to watch on YouTube and you're like Austin, I don't want to join your stupid group. That's rude. That's cool too. I've got the video on the channel and it'll be right here, so go click and check that out. I'll see you in the next video.