Obligatory disclaimer, you can't paint with a broad brush and this is going to be different for everybody. And it's absolutely worth testing. And I really mean that we're still testing it on every individual client. But our findings have been that for new customer acquisition, it falls massively short. And to preface, one thing to note is Performance Max has three manifestations. It has more than that, but three primary manifestations, which would be feed only and Performance Max feed only. If you're not familiar with that, it's when you effectively hamstring Performance Max intentionally, and you turn it into a smart shopping campaign because feed only forces it to go into shopping based Placements. it's pretty cool the way that performance max feed only campaigns can work. We've got a video all about that on the solutions at YouTube channel. If anybody's interested, then there's the performance max non feed for e com, which is also really interesting. It tricks performance max into being something like a DSA campaign. It doesn't necessarily push conversions the way that it should, but it helps a lot with top of the funnel interest based. Audience building, those types of things. And then of course there's the full build where you give it the feed, you give it the conversion actions, you give it all the assets that it needs and it takes it and runs with it. with those three manifestations in mind, where I really like using performance max is when I want to improve and increase the efficacy of my return traffic. Cause just because we say, Oh, performance max just, sells your customers back to you. That sounds so dismissive that you'd never want to run it, but what. Companies are finding, especially larger companies with large customer bases is you can increase the frequency with which somebody purchases. You can protect that repeat purchase, especially if you have competitors that are selling the same shit. You can improve the value of those repeat purchases. So if they were going to buy, one bag of coffee grounds, maybe now they buy four. There's a lot of. Use cases as to when, why, and how you'd want to continue to maximize the value of returning customers, remarketing lists, brand traffic, customer competitor traffic bottom of the funnel already exposed to you. Traffic bounces. Atrophied clients, dropped off clients, et cetera. And performance max does phenomenally well there. if you have any question as to whether or not it works, then just look at your media efficiency ratio when you use it compared to when you don't. And that's the purest way to see the true impact that performance max is having on your overall campaign performance, which incidentally, for all my CMOs and director of marketing, you have to be looking at efficiency ratio. It's the, probably the single most important KPI in marketing period. And it will protect you from situations and instances where your Google ads agency says, Oh, you're getting a 900 percent ROAS. But for whatever weird reason, that's not reflected in your bank account. If you're spending a dollar and you're getting 3 back, but then some jackass that looks a lot like me. Comes and says, you're getting a 900 percent ROAS. My question is, why don't I have 9 in my bank account for every dollar that I've spent? That would be 900%. And here's what's crazy. They don't know. They can't answer that. the real return? And that's what Murr will tell you. We've got a whole video on that too, by the way, Ralph called CMO math on our YouTube channel. We might want to bring John in to talk about that because that's a great topic. Yeah. Let's leave links in the show notes to both of those. I'm gonna grab both of those from you. Post show. But that's the helpful piece of performance Max is maximizing the value of, existing prospects, existing traffic. And that shouldn't be understated because that's still really important too. Is it cost efficient though? Devil's advocate here, it depends on who you are. I'm gonna spend more money to get the same customer to buy again that I already got before. Like, why don't I just use a free email and SMS nurture. Email and SMS nurture. So we've got a mutual client who sells consumables in the pet space. And what's interesting is we've tried it basically in all the ways that you can imagine trying it. And what we found is performance max still maximizes the value of their existing client base better than. Not having it. So they still do emails. They do SMS. Do they do direct mail drops? Like they do everything you can think of. And when you layer on PMAX they still get an uptick in return. It's not huge, but they're also so big that those little improvements But if I were a small e com biz, if I'm spending sub, 20, 30 grand I would want nothing but new customer acquisition. That's why I think when that feature came out, I was particularly excited about it. Oh dude, you and me both. It showed some initial gain. still does. When you turn on new customer acquisition, two weeks looks promising. it looks really prime. Then it dies. And I don't know why I, maybe somebody at Google can answer this. Maybe I'm using it wrong, dude. Like I don't, but we've tried it over and over again. We're not dummies. Yeah. New customer acquisition and performance max still to date does not work. If you're a Google ads manager, that's made it work, reach out to me, come on the show, train us up. You'd have to be able to prove it. But if you can prove you've made new customer acquisition work instead of performance max and be receptive to me digging into it and finding out that actually might not necessarily be the case. I'd love to learn what you're doing because just click checking that box doesn't work a hundred percent. It's one of the reasons why we talk about this at the beginning of the show is like our tagline for the show is customer acquisition, right? It's new customers, leads and sales ultimately to enhance and achieve your vision as an organization. But new customer acquisition is one of the hardest things to do online. It's one of the hardest things to do in marketing and business in business for sure. So the economics of selling more to who you've already bought is. Obviously important, but as long as it's being done economically and it's additive to other ways, let's not forget, like just Google itself is not. I'm sure you have plenty of customers and all they do is Google ads and that's it. But if you're looking at a well diversified, we have some larger customers. I would say 10 to a hundred to a couple hundred million level customers, they're using multiple channels to figure all this out and using Mer. As the touchstone for all of it. Because that's what the big boys do. And that's how you actually grow and scale a business, but it's all got to work out economically. Like when we, when we do a discovery call or a growth plan for a customer is Hey, I'm getting the two X row ass right now on all my. Meta ads, and I'm spending 20, 30, 000 a month. And I want you guys to get it to three X. I'm like first off, I know for a fact, you're probably not excluding new previous customers, any of your targeting, you're not doing exclusions and exclusions are not. I'll be all end all by the way even though you can do exclusions and I know you can do the same thing on Google performance max, it doesn't guarantee that the algorithm is still going to find people who are familiar with your brand or maybe bought before engaged with your brand prior. So the first thing that I usually do is I say, Hey, your ROAS is going to go down. Now, the problem is your front end creative. The problem is your conversion rate on your page. The problem is that none of your tracking is set up. You're not optimizing for the right event. It's almost you have to accept the fact that customer acquisition, new customer acquisition is the hardest thing to do on the planet. And you're going to have to figure out how to work around that. We just thought that performance max was going to really sort it out because Google knows so much about all of us, right? It's still 72 million, psychographic and demographic profiling factors and everything. Let's just up that to a hundred million at this point. It's a trillion. You would be smarter now and could really focus on people who have never known who you are, but the algorithms are always going to corner the market on the people who are most likely to convert, right? So going back to our previous conversations of brand awareness, consideration ads, like creating your own market through your front end creative and then getting them into the conversion campaigns. We're going to continue to talk about that as a growing trend here, because at the end of the day, the goal is not necessarily spend money on brand. The goal is to expand the market for your brand so you can acquire more customers. And I'm just amazed that. That part of it for Google Performance Max with all the brainpower, with all the data points, hasn't been able to solve that issue. That's the key to online marketing is customer acquisition. Bottom of the funnel stuff is easy. Yeah, they'll crack the code. There's no way they don't. There's a reason they put that little checkbox they've already planted a flag in the ground saying we are going to do this at some point. I'm just here to tell you that it doesn't work. Yeah. Interesting.