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    PMax vs Classic Shopping Campaigns

    Posted by CristianGabriel8 on June 29, 2024 at 4:22 am

    this is not a complaining post so bear with me

    I have a couple of years since I was using PMax campaigns for my store (edible decorations manufacturer company). In the last months, sales dropped big time. I thought “maybe I’m doing something wrong”, I started to read all forums, groups, got in touch with several companies (even people from Google Ads), nothing really helped.
    Basically, no matter the strategy I want to use, Google will eat my money, send tons of useless traffic and get just a couple of small orders. I checked everything, signals, tags, tag manager, headlines, pictures, videos, absolutely anything.
    The shop is on Shopify, it’s almost 6 years old, we have lots of customers database, GA4, everything works together, no errors.

    Anyway, here, on this sub, I saw some discussion where someone recommended to use a search campaign + classic shopping campaign instead PMax. I said “what the …” and give it a try.
    Well, what can I say, I have at least similar or even better results at a fraction of the price. Now it’s up to me to improve especially the searching campaign since the classic shopping campaign can’t be customized too much (and that’s a good thing).

    My point is: if you see some bad results lately, just give it a try, for 1-2 weeks and, even if you won’t see an increase in your orders number, at least you will pay much less than running a PMax campaign. At least this happened for me.

    *sorry for my poor English, not a native speaker

    CristianGabriel8 replied 1 year ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
  • 1 Reply
  • fathom53

    Guest
    June 29, 2024 at 5:53 am

    PMax is great but it can be harder to use and sometimes does not work for all ad account. Nothing wrong with using search campaigns and shopping campaigns to make your business more money and get conversions. We still use both campaigns types and PMax where it makes sense for clients.

  • rturtle

    Guest
    June 29, 2024 at 1:49 pm

    You know the concept of look-a-like audiences? PMax does this except it’s look-a-like advertisers.

    For smaller retailers there just isn’t enough data to model conversions for every product and every keyword, so Google is going to lump you in with what it thinks are similar advertisers to aggregate data in PMax.

    Sometimes this works, many times it doesn’t. When it doesn’t there isn’t any signal for PMax to latch onto to bring it back up. It becomes a death spiral. Gradually grinding down to no activity.

    With standard shopping you can see where it’s going wrong and dial it back in. It’s even possible to use standard shopping to “train” the product level keyword data for PMax later on.

    For most smaller account query filtered standard shopping is the right choice. The trouble is it takes a lot more work than PMax and fewer people can do it well.

  • s_hecking

    Guest
    June 29, 2024 at 2:25 pm

    PMax is highly automated so expect it to churn through spend for a while it learns what converts. Standard Shopping can be highly customized around your catalog & goals. Ex: PMax might focus on selling your $50 low margin items and ignore your $175 high margin products. It’s always good to have a professional work with you on strategy.

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