Google wants to make running ads less complicated and more reliant on machine learning. Is their new push of Performance Max the ticket?
In this episode, I'll go over why you should get familiar with Google Performance Max now and how it can help you and your business boost leads and sales on autopilot.
TRANSCRIPT
All right, As I mentioned, in the beginning of the show, Google Performance Max, what is it?
Why should you be using it and what is going on with it because I've been starting to use this on some of my campaigns and some of my clients’ campaigns. And it's a winner! It's really, really working for me and for them, kind of depends on what you're selling a little bit. But it's not something that should be overlooked. And you should definitely give it a try.
So let's talk about Google Performance Max. If you're very into Google ads and have been running them for a long time, you may notice that Google seems to be moving towards more automation. They don't want the average person meddling around so much in the campaigns because they feel and in some respects, I agree that what they can do, is automated by their, by their learning, in terms of testing, different ad copy testing, different images, testing, and now different audiences.
I think in most cases, they're going to be able to perform better with what they can do machine learning-wise, than what the average person can do. Setting up ads in Google themselves. Now, take someone like me that has been doing this for so so long, I can fine-tune things, I know, the data to look at, I know when to not panic, when to panic, all that kind of stuff. Most people don't. And that's okay. You know, most people haven't made this their entire career. But the people that are running most of the ads on Google aren't people like me or anybody that has had a ton of experience. Or they can go in day in and day out and fine-tune and modify budgets and bids and keywords and all that kind of stuff.
Most people don't have that kind of time. If they're running their own business, or if they're just trying to create a new side hustle. Most people don't have that time to mess with that. So in that thinking, Google is saying, let's forget all that. Let's not put all that pressure, because you know what, most people are starting to fail at Google ads, or most people have failed at Google ads because they don't have the time or knowledge on how to really get the best out of the campaigns. And that's costing us money because people are turning off their campaigns. They're not spending more, because they're not seeing results, because they're not setting it up correctly.
So Google saying, How can we fix this? How can we stop bleeding customers and bleeding ad revenue from non-educated advertisers, people that don't really have the full ability to get everything out of it? And so you saw some of this and some of the things like responsive search campaigns, which are still very, very, very effective. They're different from performance max. And responsive search in the way they're different is responsive search campaigns focus solely on Google search. So people search for certain things in the Search Toolbar and having display ads based on that submission, and the ad copy and descriptions are shown based on that. So it's basically kind of an AB test within a responsive search.
So you load up your ad copy you load up descriptions, the headlines, and where you want the ads to go. And then based on whatever people are searching for, and you're still bidding on certain keywords, it's going to AB test all those different headlines, all those different text descriptions, and see what works best for that specific search query to get somebody to click over based on that keyword that you're that you bid on. Whereas Google performance, Max takes that a little bit further.
So it encompasses everything that Google has to offer. So search campaigns, display campaigns, shopping campaigns, and even YouTube campaigns as well. It's a catch-all campaign. So that means with Google Performance Max, you load up all your different ad copy text variations for whatever you're going to promote. So that's headlines, text descriptions, long headlines, short headlines, some different length descriptions, you're going to be uploading some different images, squares wide, you're going to upload your logos. And then finally, you're also if you have YouTube video ads that you already uploaded, uploaded to your YouTube channel, you're going to paste those links in that as well. And so it's going to do everything.
Another big difference between responsive search other campaigns and Google Performance Max, is that you're not going to bid specifically on any keywords anymore. So they're taking even that out of it. They're going to use what you put into your ad creative, as well as the landing page that you're linking to, into figuring out who to display your ads to and performance Max. Additionally, you'll be able to give it a head start. And I'll talk a little bit more about that as I go through the process of setting up a Google Performance Max campaign. So this is going to be where Google is going to start pushing everybody.
In fact, if you currently run Google Shopping, or have ever run Google Shopping, standard Google Shopping, that is going to be going away. And you're going to be forced to use Google Performance Max. Some people don't like this, Why ruin a good thing. Some people are very successful on Google Shopping campaigns, why you're ruining this Google why? Well, they think you can get better performance. And in most cases, I agree.
I'll give you an example. Currently, for my apparel brand, I'm doing three 4x returns on ad spend. With Google Performance Max, my Shopify product feed is connected to Google Performance Max, I write the different headlines in different text descriptions. Put that all together with a link to the peril website. And this campaign is absolutely crushing it, I've had days where it's five 6x, return on ad spend. And so it's learning it's figuring everything out what people are searching for. And the best part about it, it gives you that data. So I know what search queries resulted in conversions. for that week, I can go look at those, those analytics within the performance, performance Max campaign, the insights and see what search terms are, are yielding my sales.
And additionally, it's automating the bids and everything else to get the conversions I want. Now, I've gotten to a point of enough conversions on that performance Max campaigns where before I was just going for maximizing conversions. Will now I have it set for a target row as and so it's just continually profitable.
So now that it is learned, it can accurately bid and bid differently based on the item because every item is not the same price. And so you know, you can go a little heavier on a bid for a higher-priced item. And Google Performance Max is going to figure all that out for you. It's taking a lot of the heavy guesswork out of it. Yes, you lose a lot of the manual little massaging here and there. But in most cases if you're not super hands is on with your ads and don't know what to look for and don't want to manage it on a daily basis, you're more than likely going to have better results and better performance and better scalability with Google Performance Max, rather than doing it yourself manually, and that what Google is getting to.
So if you're something like an apparel brand, or you have tangible goods that you ship out to customers, and you're on Shopify, guess what this is, makes everything so much easier for you. Because you'll be able to connect your merchant account with your google Shopify product feed. And getting that all integrated into Google Performance Max makes things totally easy. If you're a lead-based business you depend on leads. Just because you're not offering tangible goods, you don't have a shopping feed, that does not mean that Google Performance Max won't work for you, it will still, you're just your optimizations a little bit different, you're not going to be doing row as all that kind of stuff, you're going to be generating for straight conversions. And hopefully, you're tracking those lead conversions on your site. And that's what it'll optimize for.
There'll be no product feed, obviously, because you're not using tangible goods. But it's still very much effective. So if you're in either of those categories, I suggest you give it a try. And here's how. So you're gonna go to your Google ads campaign and you're going to start a new campaign, you'll see it, see the different options there on what to choose, I like to choose not using a standard goal meet at the beginning. And then just going forward there, then you'll be able to choose the Google Performance Max.
Once you're in there, the first thing you're going to do is you're going to choose the landing page or website that you're going to send your traffic. And then you're going to start the process of the creative now this could be the labor-intensive part where you start loading up the different headlines and the different descriptions for what you're trying to promote. Now you can do store-wide, or if you have specific products that you want to push or that are your main moneymakers, I suggest going towards that one product instead of trying to sell your whole store initially, if you're an apparel brand, doesn't matter as much.
Because of different tastes whatever. But say, if you're a coffee brand, maybe you want to focus on just one type of roast. If, if you're I don't know, just any other type of brand, maybe you just want to focus on one category, instead of trying to sell the whole store. So you get what I'm saying you can do these multiple ways. But the creative that you create for that specific campaign is going to differentiate based on that. Because you want the headlines in the description to contain popular Kirche. Pump, sorry, got kind of tongue twisted, they're popular search keywords, you want the headlines or descriptions to contain popular search keywords that you want to display.
So think about that in your headlines and your description. So how do you find what works? What are the keywords that you should be doing? Well, there are many tools you can do, you can just search in Google kind of think how would you search for that item and find, find the related searches around that too. I personally like to use this Google Chrome extension called keywords anywhere, where it allows me to put in a search term that makes sense, and then it spits out different keywords that might be relevant.
And also gives me the kind of competition for those keywords, but also the size of the audiences and the size of the search queries per month. So you kind of know if it's worth it going, you don't want to go for anything too competitive, you don't want to go for anything that doesn't have a lot of search queries. So you got to find that middle ground. So that's how I figure out what keywords to use. So you infuse those within your headlines and your descriptions. And that'll help give Google Performance Max a good start.
Now on the images side of things, you're going to want to use a couple of different sizes and there's a different size you can use. You can use the squares which are going to probably be used the most. You can also use wide. I would also suggest having those aspect ratios as well. And then also they do a four or five ratio. I don't see it use that much so you don't have to do that. And these can be all the same image and just size differently and You're going to want to have anywhere from three to five different images, all in different orientations. For that, that way you have many things to try.
If you have great lifestyle photography, I wouldn't even add necessarily any design to those images. If you don't have lifestyle imagery for doesn't kind of work for what you're selling a service or something, you can add some design onto those images as well. That'll work well, I would try both, try both just regular images and some images with some tax and design on them, I would try both of those.
In the video part of it. If you have a YouTube video ad that's at least 15 seconds. And you've uploaded that to your YouTube channel, and you have your YouTube channel connected to your Google Ads account, you can run that video as an ad on YouTube. So you would just put in those YouTube video links there as well. But you need to have your YouTube channel connected to your Google Ads account. Now that you have all the text, you have the images, you have YouTube videos, if you have a shopping feed of products, like apparel, or different things connected to your store, boom, you have that connected to your Google Performance max. And you're pretty much ready to go.
So now we're going to talk about the targeting aspect of it, it's different than search, you're not going to just be bidding on certain keywords, what you're going to do is on that targeting page, you're going to be set with a couple of different auction options. You can select things like affinity audiences, and in-market audiences, based on the niche that you're at, or the subject matter that your ads represent.
But then you'll also be you'll see this on there, you'll also be prompted to give an audience signal. And so what this is, this is kind of like giving Google a head start on which direction to go with the ads, you're giving them a head start. And you build this custom audience. And what you do is you select domains, you select yours. And then you add your competitors' domains. So if you know who your competitors are, or similar businesses like you, you can add their domains to this custom audience. And then you're using that as an audience signal for Google to learn off of. And, and so kind of give it a head start on who to display your ads to in-display in YouTube. And then also in search when certain search queries are being made.
So it's really awesome. It's kind of almost like Facebook interest targeting in that sense, where, yes, it's gonna go broad, it's gonna go further than that. But you're giving it a head start. This is why I mainly love Google Performance Max, it takes out all the questions, you give it a Head Start based on your competitors and you're the traffic that you're already getting to your site. You give it a bunch of creativity to work with. And it's going to fine-tune and automate everything for you. It's brilliant, it's amazing. If you're not trying it yet, or not using it yet, I highly suggest you do.
I'm seeing great results. And I'm very fine-tuned Google ads, I still do run search ads on their own, and YouTube ads on their own display ads on their own when necessary. But mostly, I'm seeing the best results from Google Performance Max, for my apparel brand. So depends on what you do, obviously better think it's definitely worth a try. So get-go checks that out. Now, the cool thing about it, is it's going to optimize on its own, it's gonna get better over time.
So if you start seeing results on there early and you start seeing some purchases, some leads, it's only going to get better from there. So as long as you can start to get some of those conversion actions and make sure you have those conversion events running very well on your site, it's going to be good for you. So, dropkick ads.com I mentioned at the beginning of the show, that's us.
That's who we are. And we've made this really, really easy for you. If you go to dropkick ads.com And you go to our Google Ads service, you can select performance Max, and we will craft you the headlines, text descriptions, and the images to use. So all you have to do is upload them into your Google Performance Max campaign, so you don't have to come up with all that will do it for you. That's the hardest part of the whole thing really is coming up with all the creative, so we can do that for you at DropkickAds.com.