Mike Ryan put together the single most comprehensive third-party report on Google Ads Performance Max campaigns. It is free, super detailed, easy to read and chock-full of useful information. And guess what, Google's Ginny Marvin responded to some of the concerns in the report.
I am not going to share all the findings here, download the free report to go through it. But here are some points I wanted to pull out:
- PMax cost share peaked in May 2024 at just shy of 82%.
- PMax works – PMax works quite well – but you might not like how it works
- Advertisers have been increasingly demanding of PMax, and, broadly speaking, PMax has delivered.
- The median Performance Max campaign ROAS target has increased from about 4.7 to about 6.0.
- PMax typically achieves 95% to 116% of the target, although with plenty of exceptions.
There is so much knowledge here, again, I cannot give it justice by trying to sum it up here. So download the report.
Here is how Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, responded on X, she said, "Congrats on the report–lots of valuable insights here! I wanted to follow up with a few clarifications:"
- There are no plans to deprecate Standard Shopping. In fact, we’ve been adding features to Standard Shopping (for example, the profit optimization beta). The goal is to provide a consistent experience for advertisers who choose to use both campaign types.
- When you have overlapping products in PMax & Standard Shopping, they compete on Ad Rank, which in this case considers the bid, as you’ve noted. But to clarify, that doesn’t mean you’re in effect bidding against yourself. It just means the campaign with the highest bid/target will be selected for the auction. It won’t “result in bid escalation.”
- When ads from PMax & Demand Gen are both eligible to show, Ad Rank determines which ad is most relevant and selected for the auction. (The campaigns don’t bid against each other.) We’ve seen that these campaigns can complement each other. The key is to be clear about your goals for each campaign type.
- Brand exclusions & lifecycle goals are levers that can help PMax focus on driving incremental conversions & value.
Forum discussion at X.
