Google’s Performance Max Conquered Google Shopping

The digital marketing world moves fast and it’s not always easy to keep up with the most recent developments. Google announced some time ago that Performance Max, or Pmax, is going to replace Shopping campaign by the end of Q3 2022. Wait what? What about all my Shopping campaigns that are currently live? What about all the time I invested into studying Shopping and getting certified? This blog will take a closer look at Google’s replacement of Shopping with Performance Max. 

I remember when Google introduced Pmax as a beta, which wasn’t even that long ago, i.e. late 2021, and the PPC community could not have anticipated that Pmax would eventually completely replace Shopping. After all, Google Shopping had been around for a long time, i.e. 20 years to be exact. That’s a long time in the Google world where one year is probably more equivalent to dog years. Google Shopping started in 2002. Who remembers the Nokia 6610 that came out in 2002? I actually had one. I loved it. So, in 2002, Craig Nevill-Manning created Google Shopping. Back then it was known as “Froogle”. In 2012, it was officially christened as Google Shopping. The rest, as they say, is history.

Many Shopping PPC nerds were probably dumbfounded but Google is smart (hopefully) and Shopping campaigns would be automatically upgraded to Pmax. Unfortunately, bugs are always drawn to roll-outs. I have seen some with my own PPC eyes, e.g. Shopping campaigns not updating to Pmax, headlines & descriptions being too long for Pmax, and images from Shopping not transferring to Pmax; If you are taking over legacy campaigns, you only see these errors later, which is unfortunate for the brand. Local Campaigns have also upgraded to Pmax by the way and Pmax is the latest of Google’s “smart campaigns”. Google’s AI is successively becoming smarter but nobody really knows how. If you would like to read more about smart campaigns see the article here.

Alright, let’s take a look at some of the benefits of Pmax:

1. You can unlock new audiences across Google’s channels and networks (it uses real-time data to gauge consumer’s intent)
2. You can drive better performance against your goals (so they say)
3. You can get more insights (yes, the insight reporting is actually pretty nice)
4. Less manual work
5. Wide reach since it’s live across the Search Network, Display Network, YouTube, Gmail, Discovery, and Google Maps
6. Unlike Shopping it includes remarketing

As a PPC professional, I can honestly say that the inclusion of remarketing is a big one. This can help to push customers down the funnel towards conversions and increase ROAS. 

Well, what are some of the cons? 

1. Less control over targeting and performance data
2. You cannot add negative keywords (not yet but hopefully soon)
3. Limited visibility (individual insights on each asset combination is still less than par but hopefully new reporting features will be added as time goes by)

A good article to read about pros and cons is here. Google is a business and like any other business it craves revenue. Less visibility and less control mean that advertisers will inevitably spend more money. This is not what digital marketers want for their clients. Pmax is still too new to know exactly how the journey will end. We will need to give it some time. To give Pmax an honest chance the brand’s Google Merchant Center’s product feeds needs to be buttoned up. The feed cannot include any incomplete data. I have encountered many Google Merchant Center errors and Google Merchant Center experts can probably be a whole different solid career path. Let’s see if Pmax can live up to its rep. Unfortunately, if you want to implement Shopping for your clients, you don’t really have much of a choice but Pmax. Happy New Year!