Performance Max In 2023 When Is It Still Good For Your Business

Kasim: 00:00:11

Obligatory disclaimer, you can't paint with a broad brush and this is

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going to be different for everybody.

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And it's absolutely worth testing.

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And I really mean that we're still

testing it on every individual client.

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But our findings have been that

for new customer acquisition,

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it falls massively short.

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And to preface, one thing to note is

Performance Max has three manifestations.

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It has more than that, but three primary

manifestations, which would be feed

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only and Performance Max feed only.

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If you're not familiar with that,

it's when you effectively hamstring

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Performance Max intentionally, and

you turn it into a smart shopping

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campaign because feed only forces it

to go into shopping based Placements.

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it's pretty cool the way that performance

max feed only campaigns can work.

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We've got a video all about that on

the solutions at YouTube channel.

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If anybody's interested, then there's

the performance max non feed for e

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com, which is also really interesting.

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It tricks performance max into

being something like a DSA campaign.

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It doesn't necessarily push conversions

the way that it should, but it helps a

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lot with top of the funnel interest based.

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Audience building, those types of things.

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And then of course there's the full

build where you give it the feed, you

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give it the conversion actions, you

give it all the assets that it needs

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and it takes it and runs with it.

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with those three manifestations in mind,

where I really like using performance max

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is when I want to improve and increase

the efficacy of my return traffic.

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Cause just because we say, Oh,

performance max just, sells

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your customers back to you.

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That sounds so dismissive that you'd

never want to run it, but what.

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Companies are finding, especially

larger companies with large customer

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bases is you can increase the frequency

with which somebody purchases.

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You can protect that repeat purchase,

especially if you have competitors

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that are selling the same shit.

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You can improve the value

of those repeat purchases.

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So if they were going to buy, one bag of

coffee grounds, maybe now they buy four.

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There's a lot of.

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Use cases as to when, why, and how

you'd want to continue to maximize

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the value of returning customers,

remarketing lists, brand traffic,

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customer competitor traffic bottom

of the funnel already exposed to you.

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Traffic bounces.

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Atrophied clients, dropped

off clients, et cetera.

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And performance max does

phenomenally well there.

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if you have any question as to whether

or not it works, then just look at

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your media efficiency ratio when you

use it compared to when you don't.

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And that's the purest way to see the true

impact that performance max is having

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on your overall campaign performance,

which incidentally, for all my CMOs

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and director of marketing, you have

to be looking at efficiency ratio.

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It's the, probably the single most

important KPI in marketing period.

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And it will protect you from

situations and instances where

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your Google ads agency says, Oh,

you're getting a 900 percent ROAS.

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But for whatever weird reason, that's

not reflected in your bank account.

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If you're spending a dollar and

you're getting 3 back, but then some

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jackass that looks a lot like me.

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Comes and says, you're

getting a 900 percent ROAS.

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My question is, why don't I

have 9 in my bank account for

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every dollar that I've spent?

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That would be 900%.

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And here's what's crazy.

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They don't know.

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They can't answer that.

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the real return?

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And that's what Murr will tell you.

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We've got a whole video on that

too, by the way, Ralph called

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CMO math on our YouTube channel.

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We might want to bring John in to talk

about that because that's a great topic.

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Yeah.

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Let's leave links in the

show notes to both of those.

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I'm gonna grab both of those from you.

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Post show.

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But that's the helpful piece of

performance Max is maximizing the value

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of, existing prospects, existing traffic.

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And that shouldn't be understated because

that's still really important too.

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Is it cost efficient though?

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Devil's advocate here, , it

depends on who you are.

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I'm gonna spend more money to

get the same customer to buy

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again that I already got before.

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Like, why don't I just use a

free email and SMS nurture.

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Email and SMS nurture.

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So we've got a mutual client who

sells consumables in the pet space.

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And what's interesting is we've

tried it basically in all the ways

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that you can imagine trying it.

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And what we found is performance max

still maximizes the value of their

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existing client base better than.

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Not having it.

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So they still do emails.

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They do SMS.

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Do they do direct mail drops?

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Like they do everything you can think of.

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And when you layer on PMAX they

still get an uptick in return.

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It's not huge, but they're also so big

that those little improvements . But

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if I were a small e com biz, if I'm

spending sub, , 20, 30 grand I would want

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nothing but new customer acquisition.

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That's why I think when that feature came

out, I was particularly excited about it.

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Oh dude, you and me both.

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It showed some initial gain.

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still does.

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When you turn on new customer

acquisition, two weeks looks promising.

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it looks really prime.

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Then it dies.

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And I don't know why I, maybe

somebody at Google can answer this.

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Maybe I'm using it wrong, dude.

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Like I don't, but we've

tried it over and over again.

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We're not dummies.

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Yeah.

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New customer acquisition and performance

max still to date does not work.

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If you're a Google ads manager,

that's made it work, reach out to

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me, come on the show, train us up.

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You'd have to be able to prove it.

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But if you can prove you've made

new customer acquisition work

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instead of performance max and

be receptive to me digging into

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it and finding out that actually

might not necessarily be the case.

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I'd love to learn what you're doing

because just click checking that

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box doesn't work a hundred percent.

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It's one of the reasons why we talk

about this at the beginning of the

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show is like our tagline for the

show is customer acquisition, right?

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It's new customers, leads and sales

ultimately to enhance and achieve

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your vision as an organization.

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But new customer acquisition is one

of the hardest things to do online.

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It's one of the hardest

things to do in marketing and

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business in business for sure.

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So the economics of selling more

to who you've already bought is.

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Obviously important, but as long as

it's being done economically and it's

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additive to other ways, let's not

forget, like just Google itself is not.

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I'm sure you have plenty of customers and

all they do is Google ads and that's it.

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But if you're looking at a

well diversified, we have

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some larger customers.

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I would say 10 to a hundred to a

couple hundred million level customers,

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they're using multiple channels to

figure all this out and using Mer.

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As the touchstone for all of it.

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Because that's what the big boys do.

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And that's how you actually grow

and scale a business, but it's

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all got to work out economically.

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Like when we, when we do a discovery

call or a growth plan for a

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customer is Hey, I'm getting the

two X row ass right now on all my.

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Meta ads, and I'm spending

20, 30, 000 a month.

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And I want you guys to get it to three X.

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I'm like first off, I know for a

fact, you're probably not excluding

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new previous customers, any of

your targeting, you're not doing

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exclusions and exclusions are not.

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I'll be all end all by the way , even

though you can do exclusions and I

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know you can do the same thing on

Google performance max, it doesn't

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guarantee that the algorithm is still

going to find people who are familiar

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with your brand or maybe bought

before engaged with your brand prior.

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So the first thing that I usually do is I

say, Hey, your ROAS is going to go down.

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Now, the problem is

your front end creative.

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The problem is your

conversion rate on your page.

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The problem is that none

of your tracking is set up.

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You're not optimizing for the right event.

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It's almost you have to accept the

fact that customer acquisition,

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new customer acquisition is the

hardest thing to do on the planet.

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And you're going to have to figure

out how to work around that.

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We just thought that performance max was

going to really sort it out because Google

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knows so much about all of us, right?

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It's still 72 million,

psychographic and demographic

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profiling factors and everything.

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Let's just up that to a

hundred million at this point.

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It's a trillion.

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You would be smarter now and could really

focus on people who have never known who

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you are, but the algorithms are always

going to corner the market on the people

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who are most likely to convert, right?

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So going back to our previous

conversations of brand awareness,

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consideration ads, like creating

your own market through your front

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end creative and then getting them

into the conversion campaigns.

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We're going to continue to talk about

that as a growing trend here, because

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at the end of the day, the goal is

not necessarily spend money on brand.

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The goal is to expand the market for your

brand so you can acquire more customers.

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And I'm just amazed that.

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That part of it for Google Performance

Max with all the brainpower,

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with all the data points, hasn't

been able to solve that issue.

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That's the key to online

marketing is customer acquisition.

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Bottom of the funnel stuff is easy.

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Yeah, they'll crack the code.

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There's no way they don't.

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There's a reason they put that little

checkbox they've already planted

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a flag in the ground saying we are

going to do this at some point.

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I'm just here to tell

you that it doesn't work.

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Yeah.

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Interesting.