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John Shares Surprising Results from a Standard Shopping + PMax Strategy

Paid advertising is a lot like football. 

Like Al Pacino said in the movie, “On any given Sunday, you’re gonna win or you’re gonna lose.” Meaning anything can happen, on any particular day, regardless of how well you train or prepare. 

As paid ad specialists, we can analyze, predict, and plan all day long—and still be surprised by what happens inside a campaign. 

Because pay-per-click platforms such as Google Ads are highly complex and continually evolving, and because every business has a unique set of performance goals, it is simply the nature of the game that every now and then, something unexpected will happen. 

A great example is the client account shared by John Moran in this recent video

For this account, John took a different approach.

He made the Standard Shopping campaign his massive spend—giving it $2,600 per day while the Performance Max (PMax) campaign received only $500 per day. 

Each campaign was for just a singular product. 

What was interesting is that his Standard Shopping campaign, which had a 100% tROAS strategy and was not spending its daily budget, increased its ad spend by 55% within a week, so then it started to actually spend budget.

The PMax campaign, however, was able to spend its full daily ad spend right off the bat.

What happened next?

John says he didn’t see much reduction in efficiency with the Standard Shopping campaign, but it did take off some of the ROAS; it went from a 90% ROAS to about a 75-77% ROAS. 

However, the Performance Max campaign kicked off right away with a 200% ROAS. 

He has a theory…

“I think they’re actually being shared back and forth,” he explains. “So it’s no longer a feeder strategy where it’s one to the other; they’re actually sharing it.” 

PMax and Standard Shopping Share Traffic

It gets even more interesting.

When Standard Shopping had a 100% ROAS on a 100% tROAS goal, and then he launched a PMax campaign at 200%, Performance Max took the fast, easy, profitable, and cheap wins from his Standard Shopping campaign. 

So, says John, imagine a Standard Shopping campaign that has 50% ROAS conversions, 100% ROAS conversions, and 150% ROAS conversions, and all we did was just take off the 150 and give it to Performance Max. The average between 50 and 150 is now an average between 50 and 100, so it went down. 

But because of that, it was able to spend more and stayed at about 70-75% ROAS, but the PMax campaign jumped immediately into 200% because it took all those fast, cheap wins. 

He then started to scale up Performance Max more, which actually went from $500 a day to $1,000 a day, and that has had a slightly better effect inside of the Standard Shopping campaigns. 

“The interesting thing that I saw was that (I think) my Standard Shopping campaign also was able to spend more because Performance Max equaled almost the same amount of clicks,” explains John. “Like I’ve always had about $3 clicks and I just added PMax; that just got a whole bunch of $0.80 clicks, so my overall CPC dropped.” 

And who doesn’t want a lower cost per click? Nobody.

Results Standard Shopping PMax Better Performance

View the strategy in action.

He then shares a screenshot from a LinkedIn post to show an example of the strategy at work, explaining that it was able to go from $10,000 up to $15,000. The ROAS dropped 13% but the global ROAS (in-app) increased 20%, the conversion value increased 127%, and the cost increased 90%—so everything was much more efficient. And he points out that he is getting 4,100 compared to 6,800 clicks by spending one-fifth of the budget.

His reasoning? He still wants the Standard Shopping campaign to win for the majority of traffic; he doesn’t want Performance Max to win for the majority of traffic because that will allow it to be too susceptible to the ebbs and flows of omnichannel traffic. 

“So, what I want the PMax to do is I want this to be a “bolt-on” to say ‘Remarket everything from Standard Shopping, remarket everything from everywhere else, but also don’t fall too far into just display remarketing.’ I need the Shopping, I need the PLA to be active.” 

This strategy allows his PMax campaign to go out and find the fast, easy, cheap wins and steal them from Standard Shopping, which is okay (since it does it more effectively anyway) but he still wants the Standard Shopping campaign to be the primary driver of high-intent inbound search.

Stay tuned for what happens next.

So far, John says the strategy is working pretty well and driving more revenue; what he thought was interesting is that he was already below goal and now he’s further below goal—but spent 54% more. “How does it go from a tROAS of 100 only getting like a 90 and then going down to 78 and spending more? That’s the opposite of what tROAS would do.” 

Normally, if the tROAS drops further away from the goal, it would spend less, so he is considering  bringing it down to a 50-60% tROAS goal and giving it longer than a week to see how this works overall. 

“I want Standard Shopping to be almost like 40%; I actually don’t really even need a tROAS goal too much in Standard Shopping, adds John. “But tROAS just does great for getting the similar search terms that we know already convert—which is why Max Clicks would just throw smart bidding out the window.” His reasoning being that because PMax defaults to the only conversion-based bidding strategy you could possibly do, it almost leaves it like a default that everything else is Standard Shopping now.

So, what do you think? Ready to try it? Stay tuned to our YouTube channel for even more insider tips and strategy to help you hit your PPC campaign goals.

Author

Pamela is the Senior Content Writer at Solutions 8. When she's not writing, you can find her hiking in the woods with her dogs. She is currently on a quest to visit every national park in the United States.

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