Google Ads PerformanceMax Sucks?

Google Ads introduced a campaign type called PerformanceMax, or PMax a little while back.

If you're using it, there's about a 97% chance you're doing Google Ads wrong!

Controversial statement to warm you up! 😂

This campaign type has been promoted aggressively by Google and many ads managers too, allowing Google's algorithm to find the right audience for your business by creating its own ads and search terms, going onto any and all networks as it likes and the rest. It uses it's AI super powers to AB test its way through all of it to find you what works!

Sounds perfect, right?

Well I call bull.

What I've seen
Over the past year ish, I've audited at least 22 accounts running PMax campaigns that I could count. I've also directly tested PMax on 4 different brands.

Lastly I've chatted with other agency owners and e-commerce/B2B businesses from the 6 conferences i've been to over the last 6 months.

So altogether I count around 30 stories of Pmax direct and indirect that I can judge as concrete.

Of all of them, how many showed profitability?

One.

Yep. One. 😂

This is a little bias as, of course, the audits are going to be more likely unprofitable as that's why they're accepting an audit. But I do think it says a lot in of itself that it's so often Pmax that bad accounts are running when I get to look at them.

Why is this happening?
Control
Google Ads is a game of control. PMax, on the other hand, essentially allows Google to run rampant, deciding on copy and keywords. Plus it uses Youtube, Gmail, Display etc. on top of Search and Shopping. This lack of control just leads to massive amounts of waste with a far less targeted setup. Google's algorithm, though powerful, is biased toward generating revenue for Google, not necessarily for the business. Plus it needs data like any algorithm.

Brand
It automatically includes all brand terms. A brand term is where a user is already searching your brand name like Pepsi or "Dominos Pizza". That means they're already very likely someone sold on you and so this is generally not a new customer. You should run brand ads but they should be reported on separately and Google Ads profitability should be based on non-brand.

These brand searches are really hard to even spot unless you know where to look. (In the insights report then order by conversions to see search terms making you conversions).

You can block these searches by reaching out to your Google Rep but even so I still find Pmax to never have been useful yet.

Exceptions
There are, of course, exceptions. I found one successful PMax case from a guy from Baby Bathwater's conference, who i'm confident was telling the truth as he'd come from an ads agency background and now ran his own ecom store.

He did have some key things going for his campaign:

A preexisting account with loads of conversion data
A big ass budget! He was spending over £100k p/m on the campaign. So this gives huge amounts more conversion data coming through to feed the algorithm.
He had a huge amount of products. This does lend itself to more automated setups as it's obviously harder to manage 100's of unique products in such a manual way.

So, what's the alternative?
Instead of relying on PMax, focus on the core fundamentals of Google Ads.

Start with a tight, focused area to find profitability initially, and then scale out.

Opt for 'non-smart' search and shopping campaigns, use display, YouTube, or Gmail campaigns sparingly, and stick with phrase or exact keywords instead of broad ones.

From talking to various other ads bad asses. I think this is relatively accepted as good advice.

So yes, if you're currently running PMax, you MAYBE, are fucking it up 😂

The most important thing is to just be certain about the brand searches so that either way you're being honest with yourself on if it is working or not.

What's your experience?
Maybe i'm totally wrong here and Google's magic dust is epic and i'm missing it somehow?

This is the main reason i'm doing this post. I doubt that it's actually 97% and my data set is obviously pretty small.

Would love to hear others experience on it!

And hope it help someone out too who's maybe been told to set one up by one of the shite Google Ads reps! :)