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Does anyone still use Performance Max?
Hi everyone, first time poster, longtime lurker. I work on the accounts side of an agency, so I’m not in the accounts every day, but really into the strategy around PPC and was hoping to get insight into how everyone is working with P.Max campaigns to date.
I noticed there was a ton of HYPE when this campaign type launched, we even saw some really good initial success with them, but slowly our PPC managers have been phasing them out.
From my observations there are instances where P.Max works really well:
\- Existing large brand with lots of data
\- Organic search volume for product or service
\- Client has a lot of budget
\- 4 – 8 weeks to optimize
\- Larger eCommerce brands because P.Max can lean on Google Shopping
\- Conversion tracking setupWhere we’ve seen P.Max ***not*** perform well is:
\- Smaller brands / budgets
\- Really niche products
\- Not a lot of data available for optimizationsWhat is everyone’s experience, what are y’all finding that’s working and what’s not?
Thanks!
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1 Reply
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I’ve had decent results on PMax. Been running it for over a year. CPA seems to adjust where it needs to be for me.
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Yes and it has been up and down performance. Drives a ton of volume but at about a break even. We supplement the roas with branded search campaigns and just factor it all together blended.
Since Tuesday last week though, something changed and our PMax stopped spending as much but has insanely higher roas than even search
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In my experience a better question is “who isn’t using performance max?” in ecommerce. Lead gen it makes sense to forego it in most cases.
I’d love more case studies of people who started with pmax and went over to standard shopping + a dynamic display campaign and actually came out ahead. There’s been a few threads on here over the past year where people are frustrated with pmax but it doesn’t seem like they’re able to get results past what it produces.
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i like pMax, but i feel like it “cheats” sometimes. I run a couple of accounts without brand (Strong organic, no competition) And we found that in some occassion Pmax was bidding on branded terms which is an ‘easy’ conversion.
Its fine, it finds pockets of opportunities but its still sporadic.
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I manage PMAX campaigns of all shapes and sizes and the biggest ones I ran spent around $10,000 a day. Most regular Shopping or Search campaigns can’t really hit that number (of course it always depends).
For my clients, PMAX plays a huge role. Yes, it can be annoying, yes it is intransparent, yes it can break your account. But the upside is huge at the same time.
Some more reasons to use PMAX:
* Nothing else worked, so you might as well give it a try
* You have GREAT quality assets (arguably one of the most important factors!)
* You care more about scaling than super fine-tuned profitabilityAt that point around 80% of eCommerce clients (I only work with eCom) use PMAX, I’d say from the top of my head. But for some they play a minor role, while for others they literally make up 70-90% of sales.
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