The PMax Settings That Make or Break Ecommerce

All right, welcome to today's video. Today I will show you the campaign settings that either make or break your PMax campaign because sometimes it doesn't need a new bad or fancy strategy. Sometimes you just need to go back to the basics and make sure you have a proper foundation in place for scaling in the first place. So without further ado, let's dive straight into it. So we would just go through the campaign settings and the settings that need to be in place here step by step top down just step by step. So obviously campaign name totally um flexible whatever you want to do there. Then we have here up there quite early and that's quite important for European advertisers is the comparison shopping service short CSS.

And there's quite a story behind it. And as you have probably noticed before, by default, you have the Google Shopping CSS, right? But then you always see a lot of different advertisers with different types of CSS. I will explain you why and what's the story behind it. So, comparison shopping services that enable retailers to submit product information to Google Shopping. So when you run Google shopping ads, you always have to work with a CSS partner to get your products in the Google Shopping section. So as I said, by default, you have Google's own shopping CSS. But there is an issue with this default CSS, and that is that 20% of your bid is automatically margin to Google.

And the reason behind it, let me show you the reason behind it. Maybe you have heard about it before. It's not that commonly known uh for advertisers. I mean marketing agencies, Google advertisers know about it, but clients often don't really understand it. So there's a story behind it. It goes years back, but basically this European antitrust commission find Google quite a nice lump of money for abusing their market

dominance. So basically because they have established a monopoly in this CSS section and they kind of you can read through it. Let's see. But they basically pushed Yeah. pushed their own Google Shopping CSS more, right? So basically, yeah, abused the market dominance. So they got fined for it. They got fined this fee and they also have to pay this markup now on their own CSS. But there was not only this 2.42 billion fee that Google had to pay because that's basically nothing for Google, right? Okay. Like that's fine. But they also had to pay from now on after that decision a 20% mark up on top of every click on top of every like CPC on every bit from you if you use the Google shopping CSS right but Google is not stupid they are like all right wait a minute okay we can do that like that's fine right we can do the 2.4 4 billion like whatever but paying 20% as a markup on every bit that seems to be a bit too much right so Google was like all right you know what like we will not pay that we will just weave that into the cost that the customer the advertiser already has and let them pay the 20% markup right and how that looks in practice I will show you there let me put the sheet over because we have quite a nice graphic here.

Um, we used that from Channibal. I think that's a graphic from Channibal, whatever. But it explains pretty well how that works, right? So, basically, if you use the Google CSS, you have like, for example, if your bid is €1 and instead of get getting this 20% on top extra, right, Google just deducts that already from your bid, then your actual bid is just 80 cent because again, Google doesn't pay it for you. They just weave it into your cost. So your CPC will be €1, but your effective bid is just 80 cents. So you don't even

realize that hidden cost, right? But in the end, you pay those 20% for Google because Google is like, "No, what the I don't pay that myself, right?" But if you switch to another CSS, which is obviously not affected by that um decision of the European Commission, you don't have that margin. You don't have that on top of it. So if your bid is €1, if you use like for example our CSS, right, or Channibal or Product Hero, there are like so many CSS out there that basically have all the same, then your actual bid is just one because you don't have those 20% included there, which basically increases your bid strength of 25% just with the same amount of money you pay.

Right? So that's a easy hack for all advertisers to just switch the CSS like here in that account back then we switch to our Senenix media shopping CSS. So that makes a lot of sense. All right let's move forward with the next settings. So there are feed settings. Of course if you just have one product feed that's it. Store locations you can ignore. Budget conversion goals. Conversion goals is quite important because sometimes I see advertisers when they don't set up the tracking properly, they have all kind of conversion actions. They prioritize here, right? So suddenly they track purchases, add toarts, begin checkouts, page views, they all track it as a conversion and suddenly you have 300 conversions, right, in one day.

And you're wondering, all right, what's going on? I don't have 300 purchases, right? I don't have 300 sales. but because you tracked everything. And basically what you're doing there then is you're feeding your campaign right? And that's way more common than you would like to think. So I see that way too often because they don't set it up properly. They're like, "All right, we are tracking something is tracking, right? Something is working, but it's not working properly." So that's a big one. Make sure your only primary conversion action is first of

all purchases and you only optimize for purchases here if you're in e-commerce, right? Makes sense. So you only want to optimize for your main conversion action. Then bidding strategy, I mean that's fine. Start with maximize conversions or maximize conversion value. If you're in e-commerce, we usually start with maximize conversion value straight away. It just makes the most sense. And the next customer acquisition, it heavily depends on your business goal a little bit and in which stage you are in. If you're rather a small store, you're just getting started with Google Ads, don't over complicate it, right? Just leave it as it is. But and that's a big mistake as well of bigger brands.

Sometimes if you're a bigger brand, you definitely want to have a clear separation of your branded and non-branded traffic, right? So existing customers versus new customer acquisition because that's one of the biggest and most costly mistakes that we see that bigger brands, it doesn't matter if it's like a meta, Tik Tok or Google Ads, but in that case for Google Ads, they heavily overspend on their existing customer base, right? They heavily overspend on warm traffic which you do not want. You want to focus especially if you're at that stage and you already have an existing customer base. You want to focus on new customer acquisition primarily, right?

It depends on the funnel stage. It depends on the campaign type. But especially with the PMax sometimes which is very aggressive in the lower funnel catching that existing demand, right? Sometimes you want to exclude the branded traffic there. I have seen BMAX campaigns before that spend 2K a day, right? $2,000, €2,000, whatever, doesn't matter. Quite a nice sum of money. And 80% of the conversions they were getting, they were getting from their existing customers, right? That actually looked for that brand already. Can you imagine how stupid it is? That's like you spend I don't know 50 60k a month on that campaign alone on that one PMX alone and 80% of the traffic are people that are already looking for you.

Can you imagine how stupid it is? And then the agency of

course like they showed in oh like look at the drawers right because the roars was crazy of course [laughter] mean of course you're targeting your existing customer base right CPC is quite nice they already planning to buy anyway and yeah so that's a big one for bigger brands super important and customer retention we don't really play around with that same with the value rules I don't really like it so it doesn't make sense just custom acquisition here you can have campaigns that bid for new customers only and that works quite nicely sometimes. Then location, of course, pretty self-explanatory. You want to do your target market here.

There's one little sneaky settings here that's quite important. You want to make sure you pick the second one, right? Because that's by default. But you see here, presence or interest. So, we target people in Germany, but not only Germany. We also include people in [clears throat] regularly in or who have shown interest in your included locations. So that's a sneaky setting, right? Because that also means we can target people in I don't know in the Philippines, in Indonesia, somewhere in South Africa, wherever they are from if they show interest in Germany, right? And then our ads can show there. Then you might want and you see Shopify traffic coming from wherever, even if it's sometimes like a small amount of clicks, right?

Even if it's just just like one two 3% it just adds up and also like it usually doesn't make sense target those people in yeah Indonesia Philippines of Africa wherever right it doesn't matter you want to like if you want to keep it focused on Germany you have to pick the second one because that only includes people in or regularly in your included locations right so people that basically live there spend a lot of time there so that makes sense and then in languages obviously the native language and I always like to include English as well as the default. A lot of people use English as the browser settings as well, right?

Like me. Basically, everything is in English

usually, unless it switches back to German accidentally. And yeah, that's pretty much it. Then yeah, ignore this, ignore that. All good here. Asset optimization. That's hugely important as well. And I see a lot of mistakes here. So, as you know, I'm a big fan of performance max feed only campaigns. So we force Google to show our ads mainly on Google shopping right we don't want to be seen on search YouTube discovery like we usually do not want that especially with smaller stores especially with our performance max campaign right if we want that we usually launch separate campaigns for that so big fan of Google feed only to force it to show mainly on shopping but Google is also sneaky there right because there is no real feed only anymore they will always be a little bit of search uh display video ads whatever right and you can check that out now by the way I will show you all right there it is so channel performance right so that's relatively new just got rolled out as a beta recently there's like no spend today right but there you could see basically like the the flow how much comes from search how much comes from from shopping right and in that case you have to see there okay search is in that case ads using product data that's shopping right so there we see most Most of it comes from shopping anyway.

That's clean. That's healthy. That's fine. But if you mess up your settings, you will see a big portion of search here with ads that are not using your product data, right? That are not using your feed. Same on YouTube. Same on display, especially like Google loves to like push in a lot of cheap display traffic, right? So, you have to be careful with that. Everything is set up properly here. We're not really active there. So, it's kind of like post account. But if you would be active, you want to make sure it is set up properly, right? And how do we do that? Asset optimization.

You want to make sure everything is turned off here, right? Check it properly. Everything. Why? Because if I enable this and I have like the whole set enabled there, it basically gives

Google a lot of freedom in asset creation and even asset customization. Right? So for here for example they can just take random images from your landing page to use in your ads and then they take certain images and suddenly show it in the [snorts] display network right and suddenly like 10 20% of your traffic goes to like this random placements because you allowed Google to take those assets from your website and even if you set up the asset group properly as a feed only campaign right which there's like a separate video we will link it here maybe somewhere for you to watch we have a separate video on that you can check that out.

Even if that's properly set up like that, right, for a feed only campaign, if you enable all that stuff, then it will not be feed only anymore because then Google can create and take assets from everywhere basically, right? Even there use text from your site, landing pages, ads, and suddenly you have a lot of headlines, descriptions, and show a big proportion of your spend in form of search ads, right? So, you do not want that. So, we always switch that off. usually everything some of the things make a little bit more sense but like and you have to be careful there you have to make sure it's turned off and also that you don't have any recommendations enabled that automatically turn it on right so you want to check that maybe from time to time make sure everything is turned off and set up properly then device targeting that's a good one as well doesn't matter that much but for conversiondriven campaigns we usually still keep it on computer and mobile phone so I don't like tablet and TV screen there.

Even if it's a small proportion of the traffic, it usually doesn't have the same uh conversion rate there. It's pretty decent for awareness campaign or campaigns that are bit more in the upper funnel, but yeah, generally speaking, I still keep it to computer and mobile phone and I would advise you to do so as well. And brand exclusion, we don't have to do anything there. Same here, same there. So, that's pretty much

it there. We just have one more thing. So, we want to go to content suitability here and we want to check that out. So, that there's one more thing. It ties into what I just explained about Google Shopping and feed only. We want to make sure we exclude as much as possible so Google doesn't spend our money, our budget on random, cheap, weird placements, right? So, keep it like it is. That's also like fine. We have some excluded keyword here also doesn't matter. But what I want to do on the excluded placements which I always like to do by default on account level in general especially if we have later on like demand chain campaign YouTube campaigns then it becomes even more important but also for our PMax campaign to make sure we don't waste our budget in a weird way.

I want to exclude this app categories here. Right? So 140 in total. You add them here. You save. Then you're good to go. And that's it for today about like PMax settings and what you can adjust there. Hope it helped. Hope you gained some value for today. And see you in the next one. Bye-bye.