Welcome to the battle Royale here at solutions eights. This is an epic showdown, a meeting of the minds. Two men enter only one will leave death mesh. All right, I'll stop. First blood. What we're doing here is we're debating or less. We're having a friendly conversation about performance max campaigns. And whether it makes more sense to use multiple P max campaigns when and where it makes more sense to use multiple PX campaigns and when and where it makes sense to use a singular PMs campaign. Joining us are combatants. If you will in the left corner is one of our strategists here at solutions eight and then in the right corner is the Usama light keeps darkening, which makes you the villain Usama. I actually don't know who's on what side, I'm going to go first. of the things somebody said in the company, slack channel, when we said we're going to have the battle Royal is I hope our clients never watched this, which is true because it's like, well, gosh, it depends on so many things, geography company skew count, whatever. So we'll say there are no golden rules and there's a bunch of reasons why you would or wouldn't do this. But with that said, I think this is hyper relevant topic for our viewer base right now. So let's dive into it. I'll go first, if you want Usama. So I've kind of adopted the mindset of generally speaking. It's better to go with one performance max campaign because there a lot more dynamics to it. And so having multiple performance max campaigns can lead you into situations where one performance max campaign might be prospecting out and the other one might be just remarketing more so and so in order for those two to get aligned, I see a lot of issues and accounts that I have currently where even though they had the URLs excluded we're Same budget launched. Same time, same everything, pretty much just different products, different listing groups. There seems to be still some carry over from one campaign to the next. And so my whole thought process behind this was well. Why don't we just max out the asset groups in one campaign in order to pretty much feed the beast to where it's dynamically all in one meeting the campaign is working together. You don't have one campaign that's prospecting one that's not. And then leverage that data to then locate. Okay. These are top performing products and these aren't top performing products. And I'm talking about e-commerce generally in this conversation. The only time that I've really found it being very beneficial for multiple is if there's a huge discrepancy in the cost of the products. So if you have, like a thousand dollars products and then like a $50 product. Obviously Google is going to go for the point of least resistance to get you the highest ROAS. So the issue with that obviously is if you want to sell a lot more of a certain product. It's very hard to push the algorithm in that direction with a singular campaign. You can eventually expand out to it. And so, like I said, that's when scalability comes into play, but as for the main issues I see with multiple campaigns that solve that is that issue. So Usama on to your points about why multiple, I guess, performance maxes, or I never said I was going to do multiple campaigns, but I agree with most of what you say. Okay. Actually pretty much all of what you say, but what happened in the context where you have very large skew count with multiple collections and you're bounded by a hundred limit asset groups. That's 0.1. I kind of disagree with the different profitability. One because where we split it up based off how I guess the price points are and how profitable. And like, if you have one spending a thousand and you have another 2000, because we've had accounts and we've combined them after we've had two instances where we had a very high price point products and very low price point products that we split out for that reason. But then we combined it again. It performed better together instead of being separate. So that, and the last thing I want to say, don't go off of what we say. It's very dependent on your niche, your products, your brand, your branding, your overall funnel. Majority of our cases were able to work with one campaign, but I have also been able to pretty much double in account's budget while giving a higher ROAS than what the client wanted in an account with a Browns launching eight campaigns. And they didn't have 100 asset group deal started with like six, seven asset groups. And now I think they're up to like 15, 20, so it's not like a ridiculous build out to, so that's heavily dependent on the type of products you have. And so I'm going to go deeper into what that was. So this was an account and when I decided to split it up, It initially started off with everything combined together. And then what we kind of noticed was because this person was carrying branded products. People were searching specifically for those brands. Now these are well-known brands in that niche. People go for them. So what we started doing was starting to split based off of each brand and then started categorizing the products in those asset groups accordingly. And their goal was five bucks. And we were heavily scaling during that time. Like each time we created a separate campaign we were setting up high budget. We were sending it at a a hundred dollars. Basically the original campaign had like things like 300 or 400 and each new campaign we launched, what's running, starting getting like a hundred, $150. So we'd set up eight. So we pretty much doubled tripled their budget and that one month and each one of those campaigns took off immediately based off of the brand. So what we kind of did after is like the brands that did really well, we identified like these are the brands that people liked is a private people do, and we're scaling those even more now, or the brands that didn't work out as properly. They don't work out as well. We kind of regroup them back together into a single campaign. And now that's doing better too, but it was interesting that happened here. I have an assertion based on what you just said, and I want you all to tell me what you think about this, because it's a golden rule and I know John wants to know golden rules for performance max. It sounds like it's one performance Max campaign per unique audience. Yes. So if the audience is the same, even if the products are disparate, have massive spreads, different margins. If the service is the same, as long as the audience is the same, it's in one performance Mex campaign. The minute you have a separate audience, cause I know we talk about splitting up performance max campaigns by language, which is separate audience, someone just said with the different brands, people are going after very specific brands. That's a different audience. I'm going to send you the niche There was this niche and we were selling this. And that's what all the brands carried, essentially. Those two products are basically the two major ones. And these were like secondary ones, which we have a campaign for just this. And it's doing extremely well. This is a good example. I'm just going to say it because we're not giving away the client is so the Niche is maybe product. Separate PMax campaign for strollers separate Pmax campaign for car seats? No, no, no. It was PMX campaign for each brand. We don't even split up the asset if they're combined. So all babies strollers and the car seats and toys were in that ask the group Do separate PMax campaign for every stroller brand. Yeah. Essentially every baby brand we'd split up into a separate thing. And literally in a month we doubled their budget. again, build are well-known brands, like, think about it. Like parents do heavy research into those brands. They'd go after it. Right. And as soon as PMX is able to identify how far down the funnel they are, he's able to capture it right when they need. I wonder if the reason for that would be based on the fact that they're already established. And so they've already taken their slice of the pie and you're just leveraging that aspect of it. That's literally it like they're well established people know about them. You're literally going after that traffic and majority of our convergence impact. Those are campaigns are those Branded and right. It's like no brand stroller, brand blink, blink stroller, and P max is because it knows what to happen. It's absolutely crushing it going after the exact bottom of funnel traffic, it needs to. So for like the audience signals, roughly, like, are you using like, just, the normal setup or this like keywords URLs, converters. Like it's all just lumped into onekind of thing No, I have it split up. But it's not that aggressive is the word I'm going to use. It's not like we have like 50 asset groups built out. It's more like we have maybe 12 and that was built up by the way, based off the insights we got. And the interesting part was that I used insights from the other campaigns as well and I could use that audience because it was the same audience. Cause like the general niche of the products are the same. so because each pmax is probably going after different audiences testing them. I just thought the best ones I created as a group around them. Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. The cross-pollination of audience across PMX campaigns. That's a good debate point. Yeah. Well, such a unique and specific instance though. I think if you're carrying brands that are well-known right, you could get away with it and you could scale heavily. I won't say the name I once ran an account for a guy that was selling Nike shoes. I spent a lot of money on that campaign and all my conversions were literally branded. So if it's a well-known brand, right, people are searching for that brand in ridiculous amounts because they want their products. Right. It will go after those terms immediately. There's no thought behind it. Hmm. Yeah. That makes sense. I mean, I have an account that is doing something similar to that, I guess in that situation though it's v ery instead of segmenting by brand, it's more so by like product and then there's asset groups in there that are segmented out by brand that then use the keywords and then it's working. So that's why, I guess I wonder if maybe then depending on, the difference that could be like kind of a full test as if we can see which way is better to segments out, whether it be by general product type or if we go directly into brand and then lean more into that and see if that actually gives us a better. I personally think you should start with a catchall with a single camp, especially if you're carrying multiple brands. Start with. Everything combined to the other, but split your, a group based off of brands. Right. So, yeah, so we did do that. The issue came back down to sort of the idea I was talking about earlier, which was ROAS many of the ROAS goals were very different for one product versus another product. And so that kind of led to the algorithm favoring, like, okay, we can get this, we can scale this

up

And then this higher ROAS for this product might, may just be a byproduct of it. That goes back to the conversation that we had a while ago. I think this is John and I met it. Actually might've been all the strategies. We just can't have role-wise goals for early stage performance max campaigns. It's we're going to go spend, see what's possible. And then based off of performance, we can start to split things off and then apply ROAS goals if and when necessary, but for a client to come, fresh, new to performance max, which has all of them and say, I want to test performance max, and I need to get a three X, five X, 10 X, whatever. We can't do both of those things. It's like, we're going to test performance max, go learn, identify your audience. And then we'll figure out what the ROAS goal should be. This is actually a sales problem. We have a sales problem right now because we're selling the way that we were sold smart shopping, cause smart shopping it was like, Hey, generally speaking, we can get it to be a hundred percent ROAS on the vast majority of products that have an $80 AOV. And then we can scale that. And we had some clients who got up to 15000% ROAS with performance max ROAS isn't the first. Proof of concept with the audiences. The first step and ROAS is the second step. It's also a goal standard that we used to have with the rest. It's like if you have 50 conversions, you should set a ROAS goal of whatever you want on it that no longer takes effect here. Because when you think about it, that 50 conversions was for one network, right? So now we're across seven different networks, basically. Right? So what we really need in a month is like, A hundred plus conversions before we go any even consider putting ROAS on it. And just to add on to the ROAS argument, I don't like putting ROAS goal on it. I'd rather play around with my asset groups pair on with my listing groups till I maximize how much ROAS I can get and how much I can spend and get away with it. I've hit that plateau. That's when I put a ROAS pull on my accounts, I guess the way that I look at it, it's not necessarily, when I say ROAS goal I don't mean like setting a ROAS goal. I mean, just like that's the goal in my head for the client. And so it's like, okay, they spend this much, what is the Delta for them to reach that? And so like what I found a lot of times with performance max, is that, sometimes you come in too high or too low on the budget. And then you have to sort of like massage it to where you're like, okay, this is the goal. And then start to scale. Cause I found that performance max is essentially, a way of another combative. This is like the WWF, I guess y'all are young. So for you, it's the WWE. But like, somebody comes in halfway through the fight with a chair or a lamp. So we're having a battle Royal. And actually so far everybody agrees, this is a horrible fight. Yeah. It's good information. That's exactly right. We're talking about, when do you use one performance max campaign, when you use multiple performance max campaigns and this is a good opportunity to summarize. can, you give us what you think your summary is so far. Some of you give us what you think your summary is so far. They tell me everything that has been pulled and I'm going to count. So I mean, I guess for my understanding is we pretty much me and Usama agree on like 90% of the things that we discussed that having a one performance max campaign is generally good if you have all the assets built out, however, in certain instances, For specific situations. Like if you have a brand that's very established and you already have like a very designated audience and the audience pool of Google, then it makes a lot more sense to break it out into separate campaigns. I'm kind of the mindset of, I still think that if there's a discrepancy in product price, that there's still a reason to split out the campaigns. And so we're kind of going back and forth on that. What you have said. It's wrong. That's pretty much the context. So now what's your thought on one PMax versus multiple incomes? This lane back it'd be more like one always, always one. What about multiple languages? Multiple countries. And what if we have too many collections and not, I can't build enough asset groups. Yeah, that's the thing the, rule seems to be one performance max campaign, generally speaking, unless there's like really specific multiple countries, multiple languages, massive skew count. To the point that if someone was making right before I joined, if you find products that are going to perform better in a second. Probably because they have a dedicated audience, then you can spend those off in their own PMX campaign. My question there, and this gets a little philosophical, which that's where I like to go with this is it felt like smart shopping did a really good job at maximizing the value of a customer. So if you bought my bike, you're going to buy my tires on my bike, pumping my helmet. If I took the bike and I put it in its own PMX campaign. I don't think that Pemex campaign will then go sell you after you buy my bike. It's not going to go sell you my tires, my bike pump in my helmet, unless I build that into its own specific remarketing campaign. So maybe that's part of the strategy, but there's definitely not a set and forget ability to go back and milk your customers for more. Yeah. I think the remarketing that we were talking about earlier with John, that whole shift and everything was like a big factor that were like, I wondered why we were seeing some discrepancies on transitioning over from smart shop and do performance. Because you look at smart shop and you're like, oh my gosh, we're getting super good ROAS, but we're getting a ton of returning customers. And so that's sort of like 80 20 rule that, we were talking about earlier, which is like, performance max is going to be 8% towards new customers, 20% towards returning customers. And then smart shopping is reverse of that. And so with the trade-off with the performance max is yes. You can keep scaling because it's going to keep prospecting for new customers. However, you have a tail behind that. You still have to cannibalize to try to say, okay, what else can we get out of these customers? So I think adding in that dynamic or marketing was definitely a really good call on that. And I think that'll help a lot of accounts. And I think just to advocate as point to smart shopping was 80% remarketing at 20% output, which made it really good for reoccurring customer people that let's, I don't know. A simple example is like someone selling their filter machine. They're going to need filters over and over again. Right? Yeah. Any consumables. So you sold the device, but they're going to keep coming back for the filter. So smart shopping did a really good job of tracking. Who was coming back for it and kept going after it, because it was more remarketing. It was focusing on getting that customer to come back to you and buy more stuff. So if you had, like you said, something consumer based or conceivable based, it would do a really good job getting you back to the website. But because pmax is more outbound than remarketing, it gets the customer wants. And now it's your job to keep the customer alive in your, whether it's email, whether it's remarketing, whatever. Well, the way to keep the customer alive. What if we were to take our customer lists, build it into performance max, and make that an independent performance max campaign. Now I have my acquisition camera. That was some of this is more or less. Didn't you come up with this template or somebody? The acquisition capability, the marketing campaigns? No, but then those are audience signals. They might start off with the customer list and then it's just kind of go on tangent. So if Google led us to a targeting and we were able to update our customer lists every time. We can dynamically using Zapier so you can connect your CRM via Zapier, into Google ads, update the customer list. And then hopefully as long as you have the customer, this is being updated faster than Google can run out of customers. It won't expand beyond your marketing list. What's interesting. Sorry. Before I move on to my point of cadence that you were testing it on now. I'm testing it, not in that exact format, but just with a different segmentation with performance max that you have, I'm just trying to figure out what would be the most beneficial thing to do. But I wanted to do a quick point because there is also reasons to not do remarketing in Google for the fact that if you have like, when I say that, I mean, in reference to like a subscription. So like, if you're selling like a product that's gonna get purchased over and over again, there is other ways to then lean into that heavy, whether that be, if you have email remarketing, whether you have like a YouTube channel that covers. So the spend is going to fluctuate. And so I think that performance max, one thing that I've found is really good is that the fact that it goes after new customers. And then if you have a really good ecosystem that you can pull them into, you can, lower your LTV goals, find new customers, and it makes it a lot easier for you to essentially hit those goals without having to, spend as much on remarketing as you would have without it. You want to see where mark ambient dynamic market. Separate campaign, not performance max, let's do add onto the customer list. We actually did a test where we add in an updated customer list versus an older customer list and the updated customer lists outperformed the old customer list. So in theory, if you keep updating your customer lists like WhatsApp or something on an automated work manage, or automated way that asset group is what I'm going to call. It is probably going to continuously do extremely well and get better. So the point you just made, I don't know that we've tested automatically updating a customer list instead of performance, man, we haven't. The only reason I say that is because we'd launched an account with a customer list that we got an updated customer list and created another asset group around it. And that one did better. So like in my head, Does updating your customer list continuously update and get help improve performance? I think it depends on the product too. I mean, that's really what it comes down to. Is this your niche? Like, everything is so different. Like you can have something to where it's like, I only want new customers. I have a really good, system to keep those customers, but then, you have other some other campaign was like, well, we can increase the value of the LTV just if we were to remarket them a little bit more. And yeah, I think it's just based case by case. That's the thing that kind of, is fun and also very annoying sometimes. Cause you have to figure out what's wrong. We hit on those points, like you said, is that a better way? I like it said, yeah, this was like a weird. Went from P max to something else came the battle field and realized that we were all friends with same things, because we have a strategy channel. Once someone found something, we just thought testing the same thing and we get the same results. What can I say? There are no golden rules, but there are some recipes that before. Yeah, there are no gold rules is what keeps us in businesses and agency. Cause if we started identifying golden roses performance match, because of the strength, we have to pivot very quickly to an education company because nobody would pay us to keep doing this. Do you know what I mean? So not to sound like a predatory in a lot of ways, but the strategy is what keeps us in the money because, and I think Google is going to try to optimize the side of that someday. I think that's their goal. I don't know if they'll ever get there, but it's fun to watch them make very strong attempts, but the fact that we just use performance max in such a diverse set of ways think that's the reason you need to Google as person, or you need to use it, learn it well enough to be able to. Yeah. Yeah. It was easier with smart shopping or performance max is completely different like Kevin said it differentiates in every industry. Like for an example, we talked about the usual stuff is creating one performance max campaign, but I have a client they're selling snipers enough ripoffs of hero, product disobey. And if I put everything in one performance max campaign let's say I spent $1,000, 900. $50 of that budget is going to snap. So it's eating out all the budget. So and it's not meeting the raw score. So what do I do? Do I turn it off? Do I turn off the hero product? 80% of their revenue is coming from our product. I cannot turn it off. So what I can do is create a different performance max campaign and maintain that the role score is three X right now we're hitting two weeks. So what I did is that I take that snappy. I created different performance next campaign with like 10 or 15 asset groups. I gave a different budget and to test that other stuff, I just separated out. Yeah. That speaks to what we were talking about before you joined, which was. ROAS goals come away later. Cause PMX is testing so many different types of audiences that you can't learn an audience and have a while at the same time, it's a lucky accident when you do and it's happened to us, but that can't be expectation, especially with new accounts. It's a whole situation when new accounts. So we got to share this video with Mike and just get like the entire sales narrative needs. And I think we're getting there too as we're learning Pemex more. And if you're watching this, I think half of our listeners or Watchers or subscribers or whatever agencies, maybe more than that you got to change the way you sell Pemex. You can't promise a result. You're like the R and D department, it's like, Hey, I'm going to go figure out who buys from you. And then we'll figure out how we. The game has changed. Like you said, like you are promising 90 days and you have to give us like $100 for a smart shopping campaign. So it's using that a hundred dollars on just like shopping and dynamic remarketing now is TMX is still the boys. It is the same. Are you promising the same days, but it's using 100 dollars and shopping Gmail display discover YouTube, everything else. So the budget is more divided. as far as the conversions, we used to apply a goal of once we had 50 conversions and now the 50 conversions, we're just in one network. Now that they're across a Marriott of networks, you need way more conversions because Google has to go figure out how those networks are interfacing. And I think this becomes a multi-dimensional problem because it's not just about the conversions across multiple networks. Performance max is also of funnel. Yeah, performance max, if you have the content for it is going to the top of the funnel and trying to drag people down smart shopping didn't seem, even though it was display based, didn't seem to really be doing that. It was still very bottom of the funnel. So I think PMX is so much fun, but I think we've just scratched the tip of the iceberg. I also think that we're going to end up being a media creation agency to say that, but I mean, it's going to get, because we keep coming to our clients and we're like, all right, we need more. And they're like, we don't have it. And then we're like, all right, well, bye. Like that's not tenable, but creating that amount of media, that's going to be costly. So I don't know what the model changed there is, like sister agency adjusting the model. Coaching clients education, like how do we get people to create the amount of content and media that would be necessary to feed the beast, figuring out which media type of media performs best. Yeah. Why would the fact that the Google created videos perform shocks, shocks? I think those videos are amazing. Have you to tried making them they're so good. Like the Google ads thing you've got to ask to build other something they're so good. Oh yeah. Jasper was going to shoot a video on that. I'm going to go see where it is. I'll ask we Andra. Cool. How do we feel about the battle Royale? We did it did it, it started off with a sword fight. Ended up with coffee together. Cheers to that. Cool. Well like comment, subscribe, do all the things and we'll see you all tomorrow. Bye.