How To Improve And Scale Your Performance Max Campaigns With Small Budgets

Uzair spoke to John Moran, one of the co-founders of the Google Ads-only agency, Solutions 8. Uzair picked John’s brains about Google Ads, and here’s what he had to say on the subject.

Why You Should Use Performance, Max, Even If You’re On A Tight Budget

If you’re a small business wanting to run Performance Max, it’s still a great idea, as it runs search, shopping, YouTube, GSP, Discover, Display, and Local campaigns. It’s an excellent way to break into Google Ads if you’re trying to identify the specific channel that you would like to find success in with Google, but you don’t have to run $100 a day on each one of those channels individually.

So, you do get a chance to dabble in the YouTube ecosystem and display the shopping. But it’s a nice way to ramp up your exposure on not a large budget, say roughly $100 a day, which is $3,000 a month.

Make sure you’re running your other supportive channels as well. YouTube suggests eight to fifteen times your target CPA per day for at least nine days before it starts to optimize. If you don’t have the budget, Performance Max can find that out for you and scale your small business into profitability within about a month and a half.

How Much Should You Set Aside For Performance Max?

Start with about $100 a day, and then let it run for about six weeks. Not only does this amount allow you to have enough daily ads for those channels, but when you break it down, you’re not spending too much. You also have remarketing built in, and a lot of people have a conversion attribution delay or what we like to call a ‘time lag’ of between 10 to 20 days.

It allows you to be flexible and fluid in your campaign to find out what’s going to work. It gives you your search categories, shopping results, and YouTube spending. If you take your cost per view and multiply it by your views, and then compare it to your daily ads, you can find out what you’re spending on YouTube. And if you don’t make sure you hit everyone on those channels and remarket everyone on those channels, you can stop three feet from gold.

What Other Campaigns Should You Run Alongside Performance Max?

Run a brand campaign at a small budget that’s roughly 5% to 10% of your overall spend, per month. This is because you want to have that brand of protection when you start breaking out into a competitive ecosystem.

Make sure you run a DSA campaign – this gives you full coverage inbound and all the dynamic ad targets that you’re targeting. For all the pages you want to go to, make sure you have your exclusions on pages you don’t want, like a contact us page or blog.

Run an inbound search. Start with a broad campaign. Even running it will Maximise conversions and mean spending too much, but it’ll find those areas faster, so you can then manipulate whether you go back to manual, change it to an exact phrase, or bolt on a tCPA.

Competitor campaigns are an immediate way to find relevant traffic so that if customers buy your competitor’s products, they’ll also buy yours. Just make sure you perform a one-to-one comparison. Don’t go after competitor traffic – it’s not your competitor.

YouTube remarketing is excellent because it’s an area that Performance Max doesn’t necessarily start off with quickly. YouTube remarketing is two to three pennies per view, and you get wide coverage.

So, for $10, $20 a day, you get a few thousand people per day, and make sure you use attributes for action. If you want to run a standard shopping, don’t run it alongside Performance Max right away because it’ll compete with that listing group too much.

Why Waste Money On The Other Campaigns?

An attribution model doesn’t matter to Google. It matters to you. Choose an attribution model that makes sense. John recommends First Click because sometimes data-driven remarketing is too much attribution, or a brand is too much attribution. You can’t identify where those people came from, and it splits the conversions out so often that half a conversion doubles the CPA.

If you’re using target cost per acquisition, you get 0.5 of the sale, and it costs you $10 so that CPA is $20. It starts to throw off your targets a little bit. But you can scale the first click by getting your goals to the first click. You can set your budget first click and scale what you’re starting to see in the interest generator, not where they came back through. Then you can also use a model comparison tool to identify the conversion path.

And a lot of times, Performance Max will capture too much conversion. You’ll have someone who’s googled the brand name of a campaign they saw you on or googled the second and third things. The DSA element of Performance Max runs like an RLSA, so it captures people the on the second or third click.

Performance Max captures too much. It’s probably semi-okay. But the problem is Google won’t tell you that if you shut off the other campaigns, your Performance Max dies. So always check your model comparison tool. Ask yourself:

Where’s the first click?
Where’s data-driven?
Where’s linear?

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Original Source: https://www.sfdigital.co.uk/blog/how-to-improve-and-scale-your-performance-max-campaigns-with-small-budgets/

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