Google PMax Is Killing You
- by
- Alec Newcomb
We, advertisers, are slowly getting killed.
Google Wants You To Hand Over The Keys To Your Ad Campaigns To Their Black Box Algorithms That They Don’t Even Understand… 🔐
Read Time: 2 minutes
I love AI, but not all AI is good.
In advertising today, we are getting killed slowly. Let me give an example.
Google wants you to hand over the keys to your ad campaigns to Google’s set of black box algorithms that they don’t even understand.
I’ve seen many cases where Pmax works well, but often, your insufficient data, lack of KPIs from Google, waste budget on users who are not in the market, Pmax’s naturally has a lower conversion rate (than search), and its tendency to yardsale your Ads across search, GDN, YouTube, Maps, Discovery, and Gmail.
Add a generally higher Ad fraud rate, and Pmax can be a frustrating Ad type to run. If you are a larger brand with a larger budget (ie can drive more signal) it can work wonders.
But Performance Max is still killing you.
Why?
Because as more brands use it, your results get worse. Google ranks every ad 6 ways, but since they control 90% of the ad serving market they tune the system to make the most money for Google. Your brand (even if its very large ie News Corp) just has to play along.
This leaves us marketers jumping through a set of Google requirements that homogenize your brand into crappy mobile ads that look all too similar.
This will get worse, not better, as Google search traffic continues to drop. Google still needs to make the quarterly revenue number for Wall Street, so their stock options are worth something. We advertisers will see less control and more opaque AI from Google.
What can I do?
- Optimize your Pmax campaigns and Ecommerce Pmax
- Get Serious about improving your Landing Pages
- Test, Test Better, Jedi Testing
- Diversify so if your competitors decide to dump $$$’s into Google at the end of the quarter, and it kills your campaign, you have other channel options to shift budget to (Meta, Reddit, Digital Audio, TikTok, OTT, CTV, Etc).
- Set clear KPI CPA/CPL bands (Red, Yellow, and Green) so you know when you need to reduce spend vs move spend.
- Best Practice Checklist
AI Ad land is hard. Don’t give up. Have a process. Get expert advice. Test your way to where you want to be.
By the way, we built a new resource to help you find the AI tools you need to save time, increase productivity, and cut costs.
