Learn more and do more with Performance Max

Navah says: “Start paying attention and harnessing Performance Max to learn the lessons you used to get from Dynamic Search Ads.

The ad networks that enabled SEOs to understand how crawlable your site was, whether the content was understandable, the auction prices and value of traffic you could expect from your organic content, and that whole side of the business, are being rolled into Performance Max.

It's critical that you understand what you used to be able to get out of Dynamic Search Ads in Performance Max, as well as the bare-bones minimum of how to make it function.

I will also say that because Performance Max is focused on video, Display, and Discover, a lot of the work you're doing to put yourself in a good spot for the generative search experience is going to carry over to these ad channels. You want to be mindful of what this change means, what you'll be able to retain, and how you'll be able to move forward.”

What are Performance Max ads and why are they different?

“Dynamic Search Ads used to crawl your site, and Google or Microsoft would come up with a text headline and you would write the description. It would be based on either the feed of your site, the whole index of your site, or particular pages.

Performance Max, on the other hand, is going to encompass a lot more than just text. It's going to focus on your ideal audience, putting ads on video (YouTube), Display, Discover, local search ads (not to be confused with local service ads), etc. The main reason why this is so critical is that Dynamic Search Ads had the entirety of the search term report, which was the equivalent in-page of the search query report.

What makes it a bit of a mixed bag is that we get some, but not always all, of the data in our search term reports in Performance Max. You need to be prepared to make some logical leaps and look at cohorts of content as opposed to its entirety.

You can also see what kinds of creative you are starting to serve. Are you serving assets that resonate well with one group but maybe not with another? The most important thing that you're going to be able to harness, though, is how well you have set up your site to be understood by the search engine.

Something that paid folks get very frustrated with is when we see what Google or Microsoft comes up with in Performance Max, and we don’t know where the content came from, i.e., how did Google know to pull a particular bit of text? Where did the image come from? If you don’t know where the content came from, that's a sign that something’s amiss on the SEO front. Vice versa, if you are immaculately happy, then you know that you've set yourself up for success. On the organic side, you know it will be very easy for you to be picked up by the search engine.

You can use those paid tools to do that test with a small budget, or you can expand that part of the business and let your SEO work pay additional dividends and PPC. Both are valid approaches.”

How does Performance Max focus on your ideal audience, and how can SEO learn from that?

“You have the opportunity to help Google and input audience signals. These audience signals can be based on your existing converted customers or the native audiences in the market. Even just being able to see what audiences are out there, and whether or not what you have resonates with them, is useful. You can also just let Google figure out your audience signals based on the content.

For an SEO wondering, ‘Have I set up my content in the way that my ideal customer is trying to search and engage? Is my content landing?’, then I would recommend not putting in audience signals and just seeing how it performs. Then you can see if the ad network can perfectly match your content with this user.

Performance Max is a paid channel, so you are going to pay for that learning, but it is really valuable learning that you can then take to inform additional content you want to put out there.

If you're on the SEO side, you're not as beholden to amazing ROAS and a perfect match as the PPC folks. You have the freedom to use Performance Max as an intelligence tool, where it is very meaningful. If you let it find those learnings you can say, ‘I have created five pieces of content that didn’t resonate with the audience I expected, but they resonate with these other people. That’s a new way of positioning, so I want to create a whole new series of content.”, or ‘It resonated perfectly, so I can just keep going down that path.’

If the goal of your Performance Max campaign is to achieve sales and results, as opposed to just intelligence, you should put audience signals in. Audience signals are good; definitely do that. However, from an SEO intelligence-gathering perspective, throwing $1,000 a month at a Performance Max campaign to gain intelligence you can use for several quarters' worth of content is not a bad deal.”

For creative, do ads have to be uploaded to Performance Max or can they be automatically generated from the pages on your site?

“A lot of the SEOs that I talk with are used to throwing the feed from their organic site into Dynamic Search Ads and letting it generate these beautiful campaigns. Performance Max will behave the same way with the Final URL expansion tool.

You can choose to say, ‘Make all of the creative for me.’ Most people have brand standards, so you have to put in something that someone signs off on. However, Google has become very clever, and a lot of their innovations have been in helping you with creating videos, creating visuals, pulling text from your website, etc. If you don't want to make creative, you can definitely get away with it.

Now, it will not create a landing page for you. In theory, you're doing this because you have a beautiful site and you're happy with your landing page and how it’s laid out. You just want to gain that intelligence.

Of late, PPCs have had to shift toward using the main site as opposed to a no-index, no-follow landing page or a subdomain, so you may need to honour certain rules of engagement within Google. If you're going to do this, it's important that you know what those rules of engagement are.

Number one, you cannot make any unsubstantiated claims. Even with EEAT and wanting to have that authority, you are going to be putting yourself at risk if you make any medical claims at all. Your ads are likely going to get disapproved. There are also other industries that Google and Microsoft will not allow you to advertise. You're probably not going to be able to take advantage of this if you run a gambling site.

However, if you're in the service industry, you're B2B, you're local, etc., then this is a really useful way to go about it.”

How much data do you have to run through these campaigns to get some statistical significance for your SEO and how often should you be running these tests?

“It really depends on your company. If you cannot commit $1,000 a month to a campaign, then odds are it's not going to make sense. You're not going to get enough data to justify it.

Most folks, when you're running a proper PPC campaign that’s accountable for sales, leads, etc., you're likely looking at least $15,000-30,000 a month, if not several hundred thousand dollars a month. It's a sliding scale. If it's just for data, $1,000 a month is going to give you that intelligence.

I would suggest running it twice a year; once in the middle of Q1 and then again at the start of Q3. That will set you up very nicely for both H1 and H2 so that you're able to account for seasonality and make pivots in time. You'll have given yourself at least 30 to 60 days of intelligence gathering. If you start a campaign and you run it for two days, you're not going to learn anything. You typically want to give a campaign at minimum 30 days, but ideally closer to 60.”

Is it possible to do this using an agency if you do not have an in-house paid search team?

“This might be me being a PPC person, but Performance Max doesn't require a lot of changes. In fact, if you're making a lot of changes to your campaigns, you're likely hurting them. One of the reasons PPCs have become very frustrated lately is that the number of controls at our disposal has gone away.

For the initial setup you say, ‘I want to create a campaign’, you can allow Google to pick the creative for you, you let it do its thing, and then you just look at the data coming through. If you want to make changes, however, the changes you should be making are as follows.

You can make changes to creative, and adjust that message mapping a little bit. You can make changes to your location targeting, and adjust which markets you're testing. You might also make some changes to your budgets because, from a bidding standpoint, there is no such thing as manual Performance Max. It's always going to be maximum conversions or maximum conversion value, which means you're not making manual adjustments to bids. From an audience targeting standpoint, you're putting in audience signals. You're not necessarily specifically targeting or excluding individual audiences.

SEOs might have the idea that PPCs are making lots of manual changes, but that's no longer a thing. Performance Max is a much more automated type of campaign. That being said, it functions based on the strategy that you've put in. If you're using it for intelligence, use it for intelligence, and know that you're not expecting sales out of the campaign. You're doing it specifically to see how well your site gets crawled by Google and Microsoft and what kind of content comes out.

If you're using it for sales, you likely want to partner with someone PPC-savvy to help you craft a meaningful budget and meaningful ROAS goals. For intelligence gathering, though, it is definitely still viable. It’s also still a very viable additional source of income. If you're going to run a PPC campaign in conjunction with an SEO campaign, you are now able to say ‘yes’ to a little bit more business.

In the PPC world, many of us have had to adapt to additional channels. On the SEO side, as well, it seems like the need to be savvy in more than just one part of SEO has really expanded. If you're really good at content, this is a way to expand that content. If you're really good at technical, this is a great way to expand the technical. For a lot of different aspects of SEO, Performance Max definitely can be a way to bolster your business.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2024?

“Delegate, delegate, delegate. A lot of us wear the yoke of feeling the need to do everything ourselves; be the hero and the super-smart person who gets it all done. Instead, be empowered to share the load – either with a direct report and help grow their career or maybe delegate out to an AI tool.

I put a lot of content out there. I have started dictating entire articles into Voice Assistant, putting them into ChatGPT to format them, and then taking them back and editing them. That means, instead of spending two hours writing a blog post, I spend 15 minutes dictating, ChatGPT gives me my formatted blog post, and then I spend another 15-20 minutes editing. That's a lot of time back in my day. Consider delegating.”

Navah Hopkins is Evangelist at Optmyzr, and you can find her over at Optmyzr.com.