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When to determine to use PMAX + search
Hey, was wondering if there are any particular contexts or best practices on when to use pmax? Currently exclusively running search ads, but dealing with a high volume niche and have a significant amount of conversion data (10,000+ a month in the account). I feel this would really let PMAX excel, but also concern about cannibalizing search obviously. Any general advice / practices to follow in order to help determine if its the move to run both PMAX along my search campaigns?
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1 Reply
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As a rule of thumb we generally look for about $10K/month in ad spend before carving off money for P-Max. But it really depends more on conversion volume.
P-Max, of course, can add incremental conversions and boost search and other campaign performance by filling the upper funnel. It really comes down to goals for the account and whether you can drive enough conversions through P-Max for it to run efficiently while also not canabalizing your search campaigns too much.
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Are all your search campaigns profitable to exceeding KPIs? If your search campaigns are exact and phase match, then they should rank higher then your PMax campaign. After that, it comes down to ad rank between search and PMax campaigns… depending on what the user searches for. What ranks will also depend on what type of PMax campaign you plan to run: lead gen, store visits or shopping.
PMax does well when it is a feed only PMax campaign but beyond that it can be hit or miss. PMax does not do great for lead gen and you don’t hear tons of people using it for store visits and those other type of PMax use cases. If your PMax campaign won’t involve a shopping feed, then you really need to make sure your assets (ad copy, images….ect) in the campaign are top notch.
I would also look at using [Search Themes](https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/14767319?hl=en&sjid=9158869029647903069-NC) with your PMax campaign to help guide Google towards what you want to rank PMax for. I would not remove brand right away but monitor how PMax ranks for brand and then decide if removing brand from PMax makes sense. Some company’s at your scale can see incremental lift by keeping brand searches in PMax. Google has a good [PMax Guide page](https://support.google.com/google-ads/topic/11335698?hl=en&ref_topic=10287124&sjid=4555508898547030790-NC), which we point new team members to when starting out with PMax.
Lastly, you don’t just want to look at the volume of conversion data in an ad account. The quality of the conversion data matters too. Sometimes client say they have hundreds of conversions per month but then you dig into the ad account and find out many conversions are add to cart and checkout, which they have been counting as Primary conversions.
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I think if you are sure that display and reach is absolutely useless to you, PMAX might be a bad fit. Would you ever use display?
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Search: Brand, exact/phrase
PMAX: ACQ: non-brand. PMAX will automatically exclude brand since its already being used in the campaign
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I would only use your own audiences and search themes for a first test, keep the audience signals narrow.
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