I’ve been hesitant to fully migrate my e-commerce clients from standard Shopping to Performance Max. I’m worried about the lack of search term transparency and the inability to add negative keywords easily. For those who made the switch, did you see a genuine lift in ROAS that justifies the loss of control?
3 answers
The shift to PMax was scary at first because of the "black box" nature of the reporting. However, after a 30-day split test, our ROAS increased by 22% compared to standard Shopping. The key is to provide high-quality creative assets—videos, headlines, and images. PMax isn't just Shopping; it’s an omnichannel approach. If you give it the right signals and enough time to learn, the machine learning generally finds better placements across YouTube and Gmail that we couldn't manually target effectively.
Have you tried using the "New Customer Acquisition" goal within PMax to ensure you aren't just paying for conversions from people who would have bought from you anyway?
I still run standard Shopping alongside PMax for my top-performing products just to keep some level of manual bidding control over my highest-margin items.
Great point, Megan. I do the same. Using a hybrid approach allows for the best of both worlds—automation for scale and manual control for specific profit margins.
David, that’s a crucial point. We set a higher value for new customers in the campaign settings. It prevents the algorithm from cannibalizing brand traffic and focuses the spend on actual business growth rather than just high-frequency remarketing to existing fans.