Play a game with me! 🎮👇 Breaking down 5 popular marketing tactics and deciding whether to Keep, Delete, or Upgrade them. Watch to see my thoughts on: ‣ Budget caps on top-performing campaigns ‣ Product listings ‣ Video strategy & UGC How many do you agree with? 👇 #PPCChat #GoogleAds

Google's about to ship a PMAX option we've been asking for for years. 🎯 You'll be able to cap how much of a campaign's budget goes to partner networks, and set that cap as low as 0%. PMAX bundles a lot of inventory together, and some of it is display and search-partner placements that spend your budget without doing much. For a long time you had no real say over that inventory. The announcement has two parts: Channel Prioritization lets you tier channels as high or low priority, which only changes anything when the campaign is budget constrained. High-priority channels spend first at your target, the rest get the leftovers. That part's a nuance for most accounts. Budget Allocation is the piece that matters. You can hold a low-priority channel to a percentage of daily budget, and 0% means it's off. That's a dial on the partner networks, not just a switch. One caveat worth saying out loud: everything defaults to high priority, so nothing changes until you go set it yourself. Google isn't doing this for you. Additionally, for Performance Max itself, you cannot disable specific Google channels like Gmail, Discover, or YouTube. Google is pitching this as a pre-holiday control. If you're going to cap PMAX's partner networks, set it now, before Q4 spend ramps, not in the middle of peak when every dollar is working hardest. If you run PMAX on a Shopify store and you've watched spend leak into placements you'd never pick, this is the setting to test first. Cap the partner networks, keep budget on the intent that converts, and see what your PMAX looks like without the padding. Hoping we'll start to see the Channels sliders rolled out more widely soon too!

Buyers don’t move in a straight line. They search, watch a YouTube video, maybe walk into a store, then search again, after clicking on an Instagram ad. If you only measure the last click, you miss most of what actually drove the sale. Glad to share my take alongside @revaminkoff, Matt Shenton, Ezra Sackett, @jeffalytics, and Pauline Jakober (@GrpTwentySeven) in this piece from @GoogleAds. My part is at the end. 👇

Your PMAX campaign is not spending your money where it was a month ago. Most advertisers never check, so they never see it move. Here is a channel breakdown from one PMAX campaign, Google's own report, over about seven weeks. At the start, almost every dollar went to Google Search and Shopping. People actively typing what they want. High intent. By the last few weeks, Discover had taken over and was carrying close to half the traffic. Across the whole window it split 49% Search and 48% Discover, with Display and Gmail making up the rest. Same campaign. Same settings. Completely different traffic. That matters because Search and Discover are not the same buyer. Search is someone looking for you right now. Discover is a feed placement that interrupts someone who was not looking for anything. One tends to convert. The other is cheaper and much colder because it's more upper-funnel. So when the mix slides toward Discover, your cost per click usually drops and everyone feels good, while your conversion quality quietly slides with it. The algorithm found cheaper inventory and leaned in, because you told it to chase conversions and it chased the easy ones. Here is the trap. PMAX buries this. The headline report hands you one blended ROAS and one blended CPA. It does not tell you that half your spend just moved from your strongest placement to your cheapest one. Your number moves, nothing in your settings changed, and you are left guessing at why. So we read the channel report, not just the headline. Pull the campaign's channel performance breakdown and watch the mix week over week. If Discover or Display is ballooning and quality is dropping with it, you steer it. Swap the image assets you feed it, lean harder on your search themes, or pull Search and Shopping into their own campaigns where you control the intent directly. A PMAX campaign that looks stable on the surface is often rotating your budget into colder traffic, one week at a time. The dashboard will never volunteer it. You have to go look at the mix, because that is where the performance actually moved.

Making PMAX work for Lead Gen

Meta Ads Strategy: How to Avoid Common Pitfalls and Optimize for Success 👇 My latest for @ppchero

Stop treating Google Shopping and PMAX like regular Search! 🛑 If your products aren't showing up when people search for them, you're missing this crucial step in your Merchant Center. 🛒💡 My Paid Search Pro Tip for Today @PS_Pro_Tips #GoogleAds

Today is GML 🚨 11 years ago today I was sitting at @Google NYC for Mobile Guru Day. The whole pitch back then was mobile-first. Smartphone screens. Micro-moments. Queries shifting to phones at 47% YoY while desktop went negative. That was the future they were selling, and they were right. Heading into GML today, I'm thinking about how many of those generational shifts I've watched come and go. Mobile. Smart Shopping. Responsive Search Ads. PMAX. AI Max. Demand Gen. Things change. People change. Times change. The platform changes. The advertisers who win aren't the ones who saw it coming. They're the ones who adapted fast when it got here.

Most DTC brands assume Performance Max is a new customer machine. So they turn it on, watch the ROAS look great, and wonder why Shopify revenue isn't really moving. Here's what's happening: if you're spending real money on Meta, PMAX is probably feeding off that traffic. Brand searches, retargeting, people Meta already warmed up. Google takes the last click, claims the sale, and your platform numbers look amazing while the business doesn't grow. PMAX isn't lazy. It's literal. It does exactly what you configure it to do. Same campaign type, two different setups, two completely different outcomes. If you actually want net new revenue, these are the levers that matter: 1️⃣ Brand inclusion vs. exclusion. Block your brand terms in campaign settings AND as negatives. Then run a separate brand campaign at lower bids to catch that traffic. 2️⃣ Data exclusions. PMAX now lets you exclude website visitors, email subscribers, and recent purchasers. Use them. Otherwise you're paying to retarget people Meta already touched. 3️⃣ New customer acquisition goal. Set it to "new customers only," not "new and existing." This is the cleanest signal you can send the algorithm. 4️⃣ Search themes. Be intentional. Vague themes pull in the same generic traffic everyone else is competing for. 5️⃣ Creative assets vs. product feed only. Feed-only leans on Shopping placements. Adding creative opens up YouTube, Display, Discover — the actual prospecting surfaces. You can't tell PMAX to "find new customers" and expect it to figure out the rest. You have to set it up that way. Which of these levers are you actually using?

Winning Google Ads Campaign Structures For DTC Ecommerce 🛒 Common ecommerce Google Ads mistakes, from over-consolidation to poor segmentation, and how to fix them with a structure built for search intent. My latest for @sejournal 👇

Join me on Thursday: Meta Ads for Lead Gen My presentation for @PaidSearchOrg

We are here to make it happen!

How Experienced Marketers Work Differently With PMax and AI Max My conversation with @siliconvallaeys on @Optmyzr PPC Town Hall youtube.com/watch?v=FnIwHT0V…

Before you launch a new campaign, get clear on three things: ⭕️ What problem are we solving? ⭕️ What does success look like? ⭕️ How long do we measure? Testing without guardrails = Expensive guessing 📊

Performance Max is not a Shopping campaign. Treating it like one is costing you. This is the conversation I keep having with eCommerce brands, so let me just say it plainly. PMax and Shopping campaigns are built for different jobs. When you understand that, everything clicks. When you don't, you're burning budget and blaming the algorithm. Here's how I think about it: Shopping campaigns are new customer acquisition machines. When someone searches a generic term and they've never heard of you, Shopping is where you want to win that click. It's clean, it's controllable, and the intent signal is strong. PMax is a retention and reach engine. It's excellent at retargeting people who've already visited your site, watched your video, or engaged with your brand. It also unlocks inventory Shopping can't touch: YouTube, Discover, Display, Gmail. That's real reach. But left unchecked, it will take the path of least resistance. And the path of least resistance is almost always your brand terms. This is the hidden budget leak nobody warns you about. PMax will start gobbling up searches for your own brand name, traffic that was coming to you anyway, and report it back as glowing conversions. Your ROAS looks great. Your new customer acquisition is quietly dying. The rule I use: once brand terms exceed 15-25% of your PMax spend, it's time to split them out into dedicated branded Search and Shopping campaigns. Let PMax focus on what it's actually good at. One more thing: if you're running both PMax and Shopping simultaneously, make sure there's no product overlap between them. Internal competition between your own campaigns inflates your own CPCs and fragments your data. The structure matters as much as the budget. Clean it up, and the results tend to follow.

Proud of the team for doing great work consistently for over a decade. 🦾 @JXTGroup