The WORST way to run PMax campaigns

Just because it’s profitable doesn’t mean it’s scalable

Just because a campaign shows positive returns doesn’t mean it’s helping you scale.

At least, not the kind of scale you’d see… if you used it for what it was meant to do.

Let me explain…

In basketball, every player has a unique build and skill set.

What makes the greats great is how they build their game around these natural advantages.

For Steph Curry, it’s shooting 3’s

For Shaq, it’s dominating the paint with rebounds and dunks.

If you asked these two to swap playing styles…

They wouldn’t be as effective as they could be.

Because they’d be fighting against their natural strengths instead of leveraging them.

The same idea goes for Google Ads.

Take Performance Max, for example.

When we audit an account, 8 times out of 10, a PMax campaign is the top revenue driver.

However… a big portion of those sales usually comes from branded searches.

Many brands don’t realize this is happening.

And even when they do, they don’t know it’s hurting them.

Either way…

What looks like healthy profitability actually shuts down the real potential of PMax.

Because its true power isn’t scooping up branded sales.

It’s uncovering customers you’d never find with manual targeting.

It’s finding searches or audiences you didn’t even know existed.

That’s why we use PMax for one role only:

Exploration.

Specifically, we use it to hunt down new prospects and fill the funnel with cold leads.

Then we also take what it finds and feed it back into the system…

Like plugging new converting search terms into Search campaigns.

Or pulling out top-performing products to build new Standard Shopping campaigns around.

We let automation do what it’s best at: casting the widest net possible.

And when we need control (like with branded campaigns), we rely on the good old standard Search and Shopping.

This way, we can:

1. Quickly expand into new customer segments.

2. Maximize profits for the existing ones.

It's how we’ve helped dozens of brands scale to $100K, $500K, $1M+ in Google Ads monthly revenue.

Every campaign type in Google has a natural strength. And they deliver the best results when you let them play their roles.

Don’t tell a Shaq to play like a Curry.

Jackson

Founder and CEO of Echelonn

How we can help:

Get a free Google ads audit: For brands spending more than $20k/mo. or making over 1 million annually, we’ll identify the key bottlenecks in your account, and turn it into a free 90-day scaling plan. Click here.

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