Earlier this year, my colleague Marjorie Vizethann sparked a thought-provoking discussion on LinkedIn by posting a hot opinion: “Lead Gen Doesn’t Work for PMAX” The response was overwhelming, with myself and over 100 performance marketers from various industries sharing their experiences, insights, and lessons learned both for and against her opinion. This discussion ran rampant in the comments section and offers valuable perspectives on how advertisers are leveraging Performance Max (PMAX) effectively today, and new updates to PMAX promises to make it even more powerful.
Current Strategies Driving Success in Performance Max
The LinkedIn discussion revealed several key strategies that have been instrumental in maximizing the effectiveness of PMAX campaigns:
B2C Strategies and Ideas:
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- Hyperlocal Targeting with Bid Controls: Advertisers are finding success by applying tight filters, such as interest, behavior, gender, and age, combined with bid controls ranging from $8 to $20; though it changes heavily based on industry and seasonality. This approach has driven quality volume, particularly in B2C campaigns.
- Offline Conversion Tracking (OCT)/Enhanced Conversions: Integrating OCT with enhanced conversions has optimized for true customer value beyond simple form fills, leading to more meaningful engagement and more sales.
- Creative Strategies: Utilizing visual formats like video and lifestyle imagery has boosted top-of-funnel education, capturing audience attention more effectively.
B2B Strategies and Ideas:
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- Offline Conversion Tracking (OCT)/Enhanced Conversions: Implementing feedback loops into the CRM of less than seven days for this process led to greater quality B2B lead gen.
- Google Click ID (GCLID): Linking to MQL/SQL stages trained models to focus on business value and increased high quality lead generation.
- Dedicated landing pages: PMAX shows across multiple channels like Search, Discover, Display, YouTube, and Gmail; because of this placement on a variety of intent channels, the message needs to be as specific as possible within the Asset Group associated landing page. Carefully planned friction points to ensure higher quality conversions on the landing page proved to weed out higher-funnel and lower-intent audiences.
PMAX General Strategies:
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- Strong audience signal hygiene: Junk leads often stemmed from poor signal quality. Success relied on using precise audience signals, exclusions, and well-defined custom conversions. These updates are going to be specific to your audience and may take time to learn. Some campaigns may not reach their full potential until several months of updates and data come in, constantly learning and updating month by month.
- Specific Assets and Creative: Breaking assets and creative groups by theme, funnel stage, and audience signals worked better than generic bundles of assets.
- Search + PMAX: PMAX uses Search as part of its channel-mix, and is used to a better extent when looking for other niche keywords that may not already be in your Search campaign strategy. Branded search traffic was seen to have artificially boosted PMAX results, so negating branded terms dropped performance initially. PMAX made the most sense when Search budget and conversions were maxed out; otherwise PMAX took some traffic from dedicated Search campaigns. In some cases, non-branded terms needed to be added into PMAX campaigns to make sure that Search performance could be better controlled.
PMAX has always been a point of contention, though, since controls and reporting were held in a black box that wasn’t accessible to anyone but the Google Ads reps. In general, PMAX was a great way to support existing lower-funnel campaigns within Google Ads. Changes constantly come to Google Ads, though, and luckily some good ones came for PMAX that helped to make things more transparent, which we cover below.
Upcoming Improvements to Performance Max
Google has announced several new features aimed at providing advertisers with greater control and insights:
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- Channel-Level Reporting: Advertisers will soon gain insights into performance across individual channels such as Search, YouTube, and Display. This will allow for more informed decisions on where to allocate budgets for maximum impact.
- Search Term Insights: Enhanced reporting will show search term performance, just like standard Search and Shopping style campaigns already in Google Ads.
- Asset Group Reporting: Improved Asset Group Reporting is coming, with greater segmentation capabilities as well as “Adding impressions, clicks and cost so you can see a wider range of metrics, and expanding this reporting beyond Performance Max to Search and Display campaigns.” -Google Ads and Commerce Blog
- Demographic and Device Targeting: New betas will allow for age-based demographic exclusions in PMAX (something we can already do in most other campaigns) and device-specific targeting, enabling more refined audience segmentation.
- Generative AI for Asset Creation: Integrated tools will assist in creating headlines, descriptions, and images, streamlining the creative process and allowing for rapid testing of different ad variations. This has been in beta for several months already, but is rolling out to a larger audience, mixed feelings about this one.
These enhancements are designed to address longstanding requests from advertisers for more transparency and control within PMAX campaigns, with most all of them except the GenAI asset creation getting Google Ads marketers hyped.
At Chartis, our teams have been leveraging Performance Max alongside other Google Ads campaigns to deliver exceptional results for large enterprise clients in the B2B space. We are excited about these new developments and look forward to helping our clients navigate and capitalize on these enhancements.
If you're interested in learning more about how these changes can impact your marketing strategy, feel free to reach out.
Need help leveraging Performance Max campaigns?
The Chartis teams specialize in delivering results for our enterprise clients in the B2B space. Contact us today to see how we can help you execute successful PMAX campaigns.