Jani KahukiwaJohn Moran, our Co-founder and Senior Google Ads Strategist, shares when you should avoid running Google Ads Performance Max campaigns. This blog includes his recommendations for campaigns and methods you could alternatively focus on, and touches on educating clients on campaign performance evaluation beyond in-app metrics.
We begin with the premise that marketing agencies often do what is right by the client regardless of what the client knows. Through our experience in digital marketing, we would like to press the importance of ‘Educate before you disrupt’. Let’s see what we mean by this. And, you’ll see the direct benefits of this mantra as we explain further.
Educating the client on how to integrate data from every source to track your top-line KPIs and reports is vital. Knowing those measurements first can make a world of difference to your campaign. You want to be tracking profit versus loss for any retail website.
Revenue tracking by source is not accurate, and not even server-side tracking or first-party pixels can help you get the truth about your numbers.
Disrupting the campaign, for example, taking it from Performance Max to Standard Shopping, may have its advantages, but we can’t count on it every time. If you attribute success to a campaign based on what the platform says of itself, that is not a convincing argument of its worth. What is going to convince us of its value? The client’s bank account, of course!
We’ve mentioned this many times on our channel, and it seems timely to reiterate it today. Client health is all that matters.
When in-app metrics show remarketing to everyone on omnichannel and get an engaged conversion, the question remains, is it valuable? Meh. This is where educating the client is essential, showing them what should be moving. If you are measuring in-app, you are playing Google’s game and the house always wins. You would become commoditized by AI.
While PMax shows such sterling numbers, a business hiring a digital marketing agency would ask why they need one at all. After you have set up a PMax campaign for a client, what’s to stop them from firing you immediately after? Once it’s set up, how much work actually goes into a PMax campaign? Not a lot. And it doesn’t make a huge difference anyway.
This is demand capture, not demand generation. Even though these two notions spring from the same source, they have different objectives and of course, demand generation is more significant. That’s because demand capture simply pushes potential buyers along the sales funnel to generate a purchase, whereas demand generation creates a need for a product. We generate an unlimited source of an untapped target audience.
Not to mention that PMax is the least effective network to run when a business wants to expand. Can it expand a business? Yes. Is it the best? NO!
If you’re looking to expand your business, John has two simple steps:
- Don’t run PMax.
- Measure your metrics outside of the platform you’re using.
Lifetimely is a great example of an app to track profit and loss within your business. It looks at the lifetime value and profit analytics for Shopify.
As a business owner, the app allows you to put your digital marketer’s fees into it and see what the profit is before and after hiring the ‘experts’ in Google Ads or Meta Ads.
In John’s case, for his own business, he hired a Meta Ads agency to expand his company. To the digital marketers, the ROAS number at 7X return looked pretty good. In addition, there was a 9% increase in sales and a 131% increase in marketing costs. But, John added the marketing company’s fee in Lifetimely, too.
Unfortunately for John’s company, he lost a little over $20,000. Unfortunately for the digital marketers, they lost their client.
It doesn’t matter what the in-house app reports. It’s irrelevant to measure a 10X ROAS. If your company is losing money, you can’t afford to hire an agency.
Measuring business health is the only solid proof you need. It allows you as a digital marketer take back control and prove you are good at what you do.
Let’s go back to the yonder years before PMax existed. What an amazing time for digital marketers, when Google Ads wasn’t quite so misleading and in-app metrics seemed a tad more ‘honest’. Sigh. Those were the days!
John’s advice is to take a look at what you did five years ago to make your campaigns work effectively. Get creative! See how you can disrupt the ecosystem of your paid media platforms to get results that your clients deserve. Show the world you know what you’re doing!
Educate before you disrupt!
If you like what we’ve said and you want more juicy tidbits from the number one digital marketing agency in the world, why don’t you drop a line at Solutions 8. You’ll find plenty more scintillating recommendations and observations with us!
