Does Performance Max give enough transparency or control?

PMax channel reporting is here! Time to celebrate? In a very candid episode of Inside Google Ads, host Jyll Saskin Gales dives into the latest buzz from Google: the upcoming channel reporting feature for Performance Max campaigns. While the promise of transparency—finally seeing how your PMax spend is distributed across Google's various channels like Search, Display, Maps, and Gmail—might sound exciting, Jyll offers a more nuanced perspective. She explains why this visibility without the ability to directly control channel allocation could lead to more frustration than success. Jyll also discusses recent PMax updates (like the introduction of a full search terms report and the ability to add up to 10,000 negative keywords).and Demand Gen updates (channel reporting and controls), further highlighting the perplexing nature of this PMax news. Join Jyll as she shares her honest opinion on these developments and what they might mean for your Google Ads strategy.

Plus, stay tuned until the end of the episode for a new Insider Challenge!

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Transcript

I just got off a call with Google. I have 12 minutes until my next meeting starts, and I wanted to share this with you right away.

And I can do that because I'm recording this a couple of days before the episode is going to come out. And by then this news will be public. 

Here it is: Channel reporting is coming to Performance Max.

What does that mean for you? What does it not mean for you? 

I'm your host, Jyll Saskin Gales. I spent six years working for big brands at Google, and now I work for you. 

This is Inside Google Ads, Episode 66: PMax Insights.

So what is PMax Channel reporting? 

Up until now, if you're running a Performance Max campaign, you would not know how much of your spend was going towards Search or Display or Maps or Shopping or whatever. 

Maybe you used a script like the Mike Rhodes PMax script, but even that is just approximating based on the data. You wouldn't really know. 

Well, what Google is rolling out now, currently in beta, is within the Google Ads interface under Insights and Reports there will be Channel reporting and Google will show you exactly how many impressions, clicks, ad spend, conversion, et cetera, is coming from all those different places your Performance Max ads can show.

That means you'll be able to see exactly how Gmail performs versus Search Partners versus Discover versus Maps. And that sounds good, right?

Well, I actually wasn't as excited about this announcement as most people were. And let me explain why. 

This announcement gives us transparency. We can see more of what Performance Max is doing. But what it doesn't give us is any kind of control, the ability to actually directly do anything about that. And to be clear, I don't think we should have that control in Performance Max. The whole point of Performance Max is you give it a budget, a goal, assets, and it goes out and achieves that for you however it wants to across channels. 

With channel transparency, but not channel control, I think Google Ads is setting up advertisers for a lot of frustration.

Let's compare this to another new announcement with PMax. You're also going to be getting a Search Terms report in Performance Max. That is huge! Up until now, with Performance Max, you could go to Insights and Reports, Insights, and see your search term categories. And even then, for each category, you could only see a few basic metrics. Now you're going to get a full Search Terms report in PMax just like you have for Search campaigns or Shopping campaigns. So that's the transparency piece. 

And then the control piece, you can now have negative keywords in PMax, first of all, but up to 10,000 negative keywords in PMax, meaning negative keyword capabilities in PMax are now also in line with Search and Shopping. You have the control, the transparency, the Search Terms Report and the ability to do something about it with negative keywords. 

However, with Channel reporting, we have the transparency to see the channels, but you can't actually do anything about it.

And here's another reason why that's so strange. Google just recently announced Demand Gen Channel reporting and channel controls. Really!

With your Demand Gen campaigns now, you can add a segment by network and see how much of your spend is going to YouTube, Discover, Gmail, or Display Network. (I mean, you shouldn't have Display Network turned on in Demand Gen, but if you do, you'll see it there.) You can see this at the campaign level, the ad group level, even the ad level. You can see how your Video ads, Image ads, or Carousel ads are playing out with all their metrics across different channels. 

And in your settings, you can uncheck the box. So if you don't want to be on Gmail or you don't want to be on Shorts, you can remove those. We have Demand Gen Channel reporting and controls. 

Now again, unpopular opinion. I actually don't like that we can do this for Demand Gen because it takes away from some of the promise of what Demand Gen is supposed to do. Put your ads across Google-owned properties in order to drive the best results for your business. And I think what's going to happen now is exactly what we've seen happen with keywords and match types and negative keywords and bid adjustments. It's just like… you give advertisers something to control, they're going to try to lock it down before the system has a chance to learn what works best. 

When I see Demand Gen campaigns, and we're going to have a special Demand Gen episode coming up in a few weeks, but when I see Demand Gen campaigns, one of the most common issues advertisers face is it usually takes a few weeks for it to learn and start working well. So if you've been running Demand Gen for just two weeks, you're probably not seeing good results. You're probably going to shut it off before it even learns. I can only imagine now someone launching a brand new Demand Gen campaign, sees that on day three, “I spent a ton of money on Gmail and I don't have any conversions from it yet.” So they shut it off when that might've actually been the channel that was going to bring them conversions once the algorithm learned. 

Am I trying to advocate that advertisers shouldn't have control? Of course not.

But if you've ever listened to my podcast before, you know that I always advocate for working with the system, giving Google what it needs so it can give you what you need.

That's why I don't even think negative keywords in PMax is a good idea. Because what I have always taught is if your Performance Max is not advertising on the kind of searches you want, you need to revisit your assets, your conversion tracking, your bid strategy in order to guide it. Lead from the front with the data you're giving it rather than whacking it from behind with negative keywords.

Now, I do want to give Google credit that Google is really listening to advertiser feedback with PMax and giving us a ton of what we've been asking for, which is not a stance I've historically seen Google take. 

We have asset level conversion reporting. We have brand exclusions. We have negative keywords. You can now exclude certain ages. There's nearly hundreds of changes that have happened to PMax over the last year. And I'm sure we will learn about even more at Google Marketing Live in a few weeks. In the next episode, I'll tell you all about what I have coming up for Google Marketing Live. 

Needless to say, a lot more changes are coming. I just find it so strange that Google elected to release this news about PMax Channel reporting before GML, but gave us only half of it - with transparency and not the control - even though the recent Demand Gen announcement, which they also chose to make before GML gave us the transparency and control. And even though the search term and negative keyword announcements, which they also chose to make just before GML, gave us that pairing of transparency and control. 

Either have an automation black box or give us transparency and control, not halfway in between. 

Sorry Google, that's my opinion.

I do appreciate being in the loop on this news along with other industry experts. And I will be attending Google Marketing Live in person in Mountain View later this month at Google headquarters. So I'm going to be there for the keynote, which we will all see on live stream but then a full day of in-person meetings with all kinds of Google Product Managers and insiders. So I can't wait to bring those insights back to you for our special Inside Google Ads episode on May 22nd.

All right, today's Insider Challenge is this. If you could pick which platforms your PMax campaign used and which it didn't, if you had that control, would you use them? Why or why not? 

The beauty of the insider challenge is there's no right or wrong answer, just an opportunity to stretch your brain on real life Google Ads problem solving. 

Last Episode's Challenge was this. Let's say that you're using Maximize Conversion Value bidding. How would you decide whether you should move to Target ROAS or not? 

We know that the general rule of thumb for using a Smart Bidding strategy is 30 conversions in 30 days.

But to use Target ROAS, you need more data than that because it's not just about if the conversion happened or not, but what was the value of those conversions. There’s a lot more shades of gray, which means infinitely more data for your bidding algorithm to process.

Because of that, I like to see at least 50 conversions in 30 days before moving to Target ROAS. 

Now that being said, can you see good results with Target ROAS at low volumes? 

You absolutely can. For example, in the Halloween 2024 episode, I shared an example for one of my coaching clients who used Target ROAS with her Shopping campaign and achieved great results with 10 conversions a month, but it took a few months to get there, to go from a ROAS below one to a ROAS of nearly three. It did not happen overnight at all, and it required a lot of patience.

My general rule of thumb to decide whether to move to Target ROAS or not is first, are we at or near the actual ROAS we want to achieve? 

Second, are we getting at least 50 conversions in 30 days? Or does the campaign have a long enough conversion history that it's had maybe 80 to 100 conversions before, even if that was over a long time period?

What about you? How would you decide? 

I'm Jyll Saskin Gales, and I'll see you next time Inside Google Ads.