The Curious Case of Google Ads pMax Campaigns

Auditing over 23 Google Ads Accounts last month with Performance Campaigns in them, I found one thing common in about 90% of the accounts. Over half of the conversions were coming from brand search queries in every account's pMax campaigns.

Curiously, when all the accounts had a specific Search Network campaign for branded terms exclusively.

You may ask, there must be cannibalization happening between the Brand Search and pMax campaigns.

You are right. Yes, in all of them.

The individual business owners and agencies that I was consulting for had the singular opinion that pMax does not work beyond brand terms... without the exclusion of brand terms.

Unfortunately, keyword exclusion specifically for pMax campaigns is not available natively with Google Ads. You can get it done by connecting with Google Ads support and requesting the same.

But the more important point here is, is it really true that pMax won't work without exclusions, or account managers are doing something seriously wrong?

And it turns out that the latter is true.

There's an important feature in Google Ads which allows you to indicate to Google who your current customers are. Yes, you can do it by creating a separate Customer List for this purpose.

Once you have created the list of existing customers, make your pMax campaign optimize for New Acquisition .

And, it makes sense too. Not defining the list of current customers in the first place, and expecting the system to bring in new customers is not right. What if you ask your designer to fix the CTAs on the website without telling her what fixes and which CTAs?

You can have multiple Conversion Actions in your account, you might be optimizing different campaigns for different actions, and their value to you might be different. You get conversions outside your Google Ads campaigns too. How would the system know who your actual current customers are?

Only when you define and indicate to the system by creating the list of existing customers.

Okay, let's understand how to optimize pMax for new acquisitions now...

In the Settings Tab of your Performance Max Campaign, find Customer Acquisition Section. Enable the checkbox that says - Optimize campaign for acquiring new customers.

You have two options here:

1. Bid higher for new customers than for existing customers
2. Only bid for new customers.

The first option is a bit lenient where it optimizes for both new and existing customers. The second one works to get you new customers who are not on the list already.

If you have a dedicated Search Campaign for brand queries, you can go ahead with the second option. Make sure you are analyzing two core metrics - Life Time Value (LTV) and Cost of Acquiring A New Customer (CAC) to decide how much higher to bid for new customers.

Again, you may ask - does it solve the problem of pMax campaigns optimizing mostly for low-hanging fruits, the brand search terms?

The answer is based on the application of this strategy on over 30+ accounts, and that is - yes.

This strategy doesn't exclude brand queries to be precise but definitely helps find and optimize for new and non-brand audience signals. The stagnant campaigns start scaling and creating more room for optimization.

And, that's the point, right?

You continuously want your pMax campaigns to acquire customers without being contained to brand terms majorly.

PS.

Remember, when you exclude brand terms from pMax, you potentially stop your Shopping Ads from showing for brand queries. It applies specifically to eCommerce businesses.

Even in this case, you can set up a specific pMax without the exclusion, but give it a much higher (equal to or around your brand search campaign) ROAS to achieve. And, do not set it to acquire new customers only (as guided above). This way, it will optimise around low-hanging fruits only and will serve your purpose better.

Have you worked with this strategy yet? What has been your experience? The digital community wants to know! :)

Over to you.