The POMCAST
A digital marketing podcast focused on local lead generation strategies and insights. Your search for in depth discussions, tips and tactics has led you to the right place.
The POMCAST
Unlocking PMAX: What You Need To Know About Google's Performance Max Campaigns
Google's Performance Max (PMAX) campaigns have been around for a while, but many advertisers still struggle to fully understand how they work and how to optimize them. In this episode of The POMCAST, Seth Peacock, Associate Director of Paid Media at Premier Online Marketing, breaks down everything marketers need to know about PMAX—what it is, how it differs from traditional Google search campaigns, and the latest updates shaping its effectiveness in 2025.
Seth shares expert insights on audience segmentation, bidding strategies, creative optimization, and overcoming data transparency challenges. He also discusses recent changes in brand safety guidelines, GA4 integration, and campaign-level negative keyword controls—all designed to give advertisers more control over their campaigns.
If you're looking to maximize performance, avoid common mistakes, and better understand how PMAX fits into your broader paid media strategy, this episode is packed with valuable takeaways. Whether you're in automotive, multifamily marketing, or lead generation, Seth provides actionable strategies to help you leverage PMAX effectively.
Key Takeaways:
- PMAX campaigns integrate multiple ad channels into one campaign.
- Understanding PMAX is crucial for effective digital marketing.
- Recent updates include GA4 integration and campaign-level negative keywords.
- Data transparency remains a concern for advertisers using PMAX.
- Building a robust keyword list is essential for campaign success.
- PMAX is designed to complement traditional search campaigns.
- Bidding strategies in PMAX are automated and require careful management.
- Brand safety can be enhanced by excluding branded terms in PMAX.
- Advertisers should leverage insights from PMAX to inform their strategies.
- Effective campaign management requires understanding the nuances of PMAX. Play around with TCPA and ROAS for better performance.
- Segment campaigns by levels of intent for effective targeting.
- Use audience signals and search signals to enhance Performance Max.
- Tailor creative assets to user needs for higher engagement.
- A/B test creative performance regularly to optimize results.
- Don't repeat old advertising strategies; innovate instead.
- Utilize first-party data for audience segmentation.
- Engage with online communities for insights and support.
- Understand client needs to build trust and improve outcomes.
- Embrace AI and automation to streamline workflows.
Premier Online Marketing helps businesses grow through smart SEO, content, and search strategies. Learn more at www.premieronlinemarketing.com
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Welcome back to the Palmcast. Ladies and gentlemen, we always appreciate your time. We don't want to waste it. Today on the Palmcast, I got to tell you we have yet another rock star from the team, seth Peacock. Seth, say hello to the audience. Hey guys, thanks for having me. Sean, of course, of course, of course. Seth, tell us what's your role. What do you do over at Premier Online Marketing?
Speaker 2:So I'm over at Premier, I'm an associate director of the paid media, so specifically specializing in things like small to medium business, lead gen, auto lead gen, so dealerships, and then I also support our multifamily, so we've got a lot of condos and buildings throughout the US that we run lead gen for and lots of good stuff to get through. Today I'm excited to talk about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, me too. So to the audience, listen, we're going to dive in a little bit with Google's Performance Max campaigns. They've been out for a while, so that's probably not new to everybody in the audience, but for me, I have found this to be true, especially in the automotive vertical, where I've spent most of my career, but it certainly finds its way into pretty much every vertical where digital marketing works. Don't want to raise their hand and say I don't really totally get it, I don't really understand. They want to be more of the crowd of you know, I kind of get it and just kind of move on. And so that's the reason why we do podcast episodes like this, when we'll dig in and talk a little bit about PMAX and we'll start really kind of at the beginning of just kind of well, what really is it? You know, maybe, why does it exist? Because the advertising landscape now and we're in 2025, can you believe that we're almost in? Like well, by the time this comes out, it's March 2025, seth, it's insane. Yeah, it's insane Time flies.
Speaker 1:But we want to break this down in the episode so you have a definite, better than foundational knowledge of PMACs.
Speaker 1:We want to highlight Some things. I don't think there's a lot of, but I'm going to ask, seth, if there's really anything that's updated, at least recently, and we'll kind of dig in a little bit to see if there's some, maybe some best practices, things, top of mind, that wherever you're at in your business, if you're a car dealer, if you're in apartment management, legal, wherever you might be, that you'll take away some things from the episode that will be helpful as you think about being successful with what you do with digital marketing, especially as it relates to PMAC. So the first place, seth, that I really want to start with you is, like I mentioned, oftentimes people want to pretend, or they don't want to embarrass themselves maybe that they don't know. So there are going to be people listening and or viewing the podcast that are maybe they've heard of PMAX, but they're not really familiar with PMAX. So could you just start by helping us break down what is PMAX? How does it differ from, maybe, what people know in traditional Google search campaigns?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the traditional Google search campaign. Everyone always associates keywords, right, so we're bidding on keywords entering into an option. You see the keywords, you see Google's estimated. Here's what you would show for first page or estimated top of page. Now PMAX is Google's machine. It's a beast of a machine too.
Speaker 2:It first started. They called it a local campaign when it first started out and it was really based around trying to drive like local results and traffic, traffic into locations, and so I jumped on that. When I saw that they announced it and we started playing around with it in lead gen, just as kind of a supplementary campaign. You know, when we're looking at lead gen, there's generally three major actions a user will take calls, form submittals and then then location actions right Then indicating they're routing towards the store, and so the local campaign, later to be called PMAX, seemed like an excellent way to try to drive more of the tertiary local actions. So we dug into that for a bit and then PMAX started evolving and it created more channels that you could place ads on, all within one campaign.
Speaker 2:Now, as we played around with it, I think what you'll discover in the community is that a lot of the unrest behind PMAX being kind of maybe almost gray hat. We call it black hat. It's just that there's not many insights. You know you're not bidding on keywords like a regular search campaign. Google just keeps lauding its. You know machine learning and you know smart bidding strategies and give it more budget. And we're over here like, well, give us more insights, right as agencies.
Speaker 2:And, uh, the thing that we discovered as we trained it. You know, instead of keywords, the way that, uh, the nature of the market has been going in the way that we see that third party cookies depreciating. You know audience building was everything. And so P max instead of keywords, the way to look at it is, you're really providing P max with performance max, with its signal. You're telling it, hey, go after these specific terms.
Speaker 2:And what performance max will later do is based off of the data that you give it, the audience signals or search signals. Off of the data that you give it the audience signals or search signals, it'll go out and it will place ads across discover gmail display. So, like google search partners, if you're going on, you know nbc to see uh who rushes invading tomorrow you'll be able to get that served an ad from performance maxis, a display ad, but it will also place it in search maps in youtube. So, all these channels, you can't choose which one or how much budget, and you can't really say, hey, yeah, I don't want to spend any on youtube. It's just bam. When you set up the campaign it'll give you kind of a series of things that you can go through, like oh, I want you know ecom or lead gen, and maybe change the channel, but it'll still be multiple channels without much control. That kind of makes sense has it.
Speaker 1:It does. Yeah, I, I think for a lot of people that hear, like the you know the term, in this case pmax. Pmax on its uh, on its face. You know Performance Max what you ad copy and it'll run it into the display network. It will go and use it smart, based on very little information. It will write ad copy and run your search campaigns. It will also run some stuff over onto YouTube and some of which can be text driven. You can upload videos into it.
Speaker 1:So this is something that Google's done for maybe almost since the beginning of AdWords. Certainly by the time they were trying to look for agency partners that would be the sellers and the provisioners of AdWords. This is like the be-all end-all. It's always felt like that to me, where they just wanted the easiest thing for especially SMBs to be able to get in the game and yet trust them. That is a tremendous amount of trust that has to be given to Google within PMAX, and part of that, I think the reason why the trust level interesting to know if you would agree.
Speaker 1:But I think part of the reason why the trust level probably goes up with pmax is because of what you were just mentioning and I've heard many people mention is you don't have as many uh data points. You don't have as many data points of depth. Yeah, it's that, you can. You can move around and I've heard people say, yeah. Just an example of that is vehicle ads used to live outside of PMAX and then when it started to live inside of PMAX, it's not the vehicle ads all of a sudden are not effective or smart for dealers to run, but you certainly now don't have some of those control mechanisms and, like you said, these levers, levers yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:So basically what you're saying is Performance Max is kind of an agency, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You're like is that what's happening? Is it a campaign that's basically just saying, hey, here are all the things that if you have an agency and then other agencies are like, no, we need those levers, and so, yeah, there's definitely a lot of distrust that that has built. You know, specifically with agencies. And you know specifically with agencies and you know we're here to talk about how to kind of alleviate some of those concerns, how to actually use, because it's irresponsible of you to look at some of the biggest new products that Google's lot in and just say I don't have enough control, I'm not going to use that, I'm going to stick with, you know X. So you know, I think that's one of the things that I'd love to talk about today is how, how best to leverage something when you don't have a lot of leaguers, you know yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, I I can't wait. We'll get into that a little bit. Um, I mentioned this up top has have there really been any? I mean, since pmax has come out, is there anything that's kind of recent update, anything 2025 that they've been talking about? I haven't been in the know on that. I'd bet maybe not much.
Speaker 2:They did add in. You know they've added in a few different things and they've hinted at a few different things, you know, one of them being is they really wanted to dial in on your brand identity. So they allowed you to and, if anything, I believe it's actually a requirement now for you to have your business logo, your business name. They really want to make sure that when you're uploading all of these assets headlines, descriptions, images that your brand is involved in there, it's not just going to be, let's say, for an apartment community you know, fitness equipment without much branding. So they really wanted to establish better branding guidelines and encourage people to use it as much as possible. But I would say one of the more important things is, before, everything was Google hosted with PMAX. They have now allowed GA4 integration and you know we we might need a few more hours, sean, if we're going to start getting into audience building and GA4 and conversion tracking and, you know, capturing the user journey, importing it into Google ads, but all of that fun stuff you can do in ga4, you can now leverage with pmax, which you're going to do um, and then say the final big one.
Speaker 2:I know that's I just dropped a big one on you. But the final big one is they were only allowing us to add negatives to performance max at the account level, so that means that it would impact all your campaigns that are running. So there's this. We can dig more into what that means and why that was really tricky for Performance Max, but they're allowing us to add at the campaign level now for Performance Max, which definitely allows a lot more control when we can negate certain terms. So that is one of the big ones that will, I'm sure, alleviate a lot of the distrust and the concerns that marketing community has had when it comes to Performance Max. If we can say no, we don't want to show for this query. So, yeah, good, yeah both of those are.
Speaker 1:The last two are very significant. Uh, ga4 related. That sounds like that's a whole podcast episode in the future. But regarding negatives, it's oftentimes the first place where you find really lazy management of digital campaigns is you know, how well are you managing negative keywords? Well, it's certainly hindered when you actually have very little capability to do that inside of PMAC. So that's interesting and I bet you guys are really glad that they've made that adjustment, because that's an important detail to be able to manage on behalf of clients. Absolutely yeah. So there's a lot of advertisers who are concerned about data transparency with PMAX. What's your take on that in terms of current state of reporting and insights that are available to users?
Speaker 2:You know I'm always a conspiracist whenever it comes to certain things like this and I feel like if Performance Max, if we're leveraging it, and Google starts to see that you know the bottom line is increasing we're seeing that Performance Max is being used more often I think they're going to start giving more visibility on a lot of things.
Speaker 2:However, there are and this is one of my big tips to people is you know you look in these forums there are scripts that will break apart pieces of PMAX. The Google Ads API does offer more data that's not directly in the Google Ads user interface. So do a little research, look into it, because you can break apart where the traffic is going by channel. It won't report on that and you're just typical insights. You'll be able to see things like how much was spent, what conversion activity occurred on search versus YouTube versus display discover. I mean you can download a script that will interact and get you a bigger search terms report and you know I could kind of maybe get us a little off the rails with the question. But search terms with PMAX and getting visibility there obviously is very important, but how are you using that data when you actually acquire it? That's another.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's really actually very valuable. So I'm going to move a little bit into kind of maximizing performance, talking a little bit about strategies that are really driven by data. The overlap between PMAs and your typical or standard search campaign has not even just lately, that's always kind of been a bit of an interesting hot topic for people. How would you recommend advertisers go about managing and kind of analyzing some of the overlap in data?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a really good question and I've got a lot there. So one thing read the fine print. You know Google releases a product. Read what they say. If you were to go look at the definition for PMAX directly from Google's mouth, this is complimentary.
Speaker 2:Performance Max is supposed to complement your regular search campaign. Okay, so it's supposed to fill those gaps. It's not supposed to be. You're not supposed to have three Performance Max campaigns running and then call it the day you know to be. You're not supposed to have three performance max campaigns around them and then call out the day you know.
Speaker 2:So what's really important is that you build a robust keyword list. So one very important thing to remember exact match queries that you are bidding on will not trigger in performance max if you're bidding on them in regular search. So what you're doing is that's why you have to do your keyword research. You build out your whole robust portfolio of all the keywords that you have. Have them in, whether they be exact match, phrase match, even experimenting with broad match some interesting stuff there too but if you do have that keyword, that question, whatever you're trying to show for your alpha, non-branded, that drives the most results. And you've got that tweaked. You've got your single thematic ad group there Performance Max will not steal from that. And got your single thematic ad group there, performance Max will not steal from that. And that's where you have all the visibility and control.
Speaker 2:So think about how you want that control with your regular search campaigns and then let Performance Max fill the gap. So when I talked about running a script that gets you more visibility on the search terms that are being triggered in Performance Max and showing these ads, that's what you should leverage in both directions. You look at Performance Max and you see, hey, there's good conversion activity around these search terms. I'm going to exact match bid on that. So Performance Max can feed your strategy. You can use it as a machine to acquire data, look at those insights and then show the user exactly what you want, see what the bids are going to be all that control that we really want. You can pull out of peaks that make sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm sure for a lot of people that that all of what you just shared there, that's that's unpacking a lot of gold from the ground, because I don't think a lot of people think of it. I mean, I don't want to oversimplify it, but to think about pmax is something that kind of is filling the gaps and then knowing how to over, how to avoid some of those potential overlaps. I don't hear a lot of people talk about that in depth. Most of the people that I hear on digital marketing podcasts or if they're trying to offer advice, it's all very, very, either surface level, absent of really any expertise, and most of it's just really people trying to uh sell uh under uh, you know like they're. They're. It's like a veiled sales uh attempt as opposed to uh information. That is really actually beyond just theory. It's helpful and practical yeah, absolutely for sure.
Speaker 2:So google.
Speaker 1:recently they introduced some of these brand guidelines for PMAX and I don't know you may have covered some of that, maybe some of what you covered there. Are there anything else there where those things may represent changes or impact in campaign management, especially for that kind of brand safety or brand protection thought I?
Speaker 2:think my answer to that will actually be helpful, for you know any agents or anyone out there who is all about control and feeling a little bit leery about using PMAX and there is a little bit more meat on that when we talk about brand but performance max, because there is the option to add in a brand exclusion, and that's the direction that I prefer to go in lead gen. I'd rather not show up for branded terms and PMAX, and the reason why it's important is because you're going to have clients who are going to be like why am I bidding on my own brand when I'm showing up for free? So the age-old question. And then you talk about brand defense and that's where you can control the budget. Right, we can say, all right, we're only going to cap it, brand defense, at 10% to 15 percent of your monthly budget. But when we can't see all of those branded terms or we're not being able to do that at performance max, that's why I recommend actually excluding.
Speaker 2:But secondary to that, what actions are you tracking? What goals have you included in performance max? Because remember, that's, that's, that's the end. All right there, that's, that's the target you're providing this machine beast. So if you've got something like get directions. Find directions as a goal, which is good, store visit, something valuable, driving that foot traffic to. Let's use a dealership as an example. That's valuable.
Speaker 2:However, we do find that it's not right for reporting. We don't want to report on a clip where an employee accidentally routed, clicking on an ad or a delivery driver. They're kind of vanity metrics. So we're proud in reporting on a correct CPA or CPL, so we exclude that. So then you wouldn't be able to theoretically use that goal in a performance match campaign if it included branded terms or if you're also pushing all the traffic to those exact match queries in the brand campaign, where you have control over and you can look at your auction insights at the keyword level who's bidding on me, who's showing up with me? So there is more that you can do when considering brand and again, this is gonna be a case-by-case scenario. This is the best practice I use for lead gen, but sometimes the user journey leading them down the funnel to that branded query. Maybe it would be necessary to have that in the machine learning. Maybe it's more pertaining to Econ, where I would want my brand in there. So, yeah, that kind of question.
Speaker 1:No, it's great and I love that you know just the distinction like e-com in a car dealerships very, very different goals that they're going to want to set up. Car dealers have really not since the Donna paid search. They didn't get it in the beginning but it didn't take long before they realized that that brand side of the house is really important to them and oftentimes they are not being given the insights to understand really even how much they should still be. Because you mentioned also playing offense or defense, and sometimes both right. Usually for dealers it is both. If you're in anywhere near a metro or in a metro, you're probably playing defense and offense if you want to be smart in your strategy. But then things like PMACs come along and there are other things that you need to consider based on, you know, some of these new campaign types, so that you don't end up kind of looking at a report and saying, well, gosh, we, we dumped all this money, went into these brand related elements of the campaign and and search results.
Speaker 1:But we didn't really get what we were looking for.
Speaker 2:You didn't see the sales or something Organic took a hit. Why did organic? Well your money on brand.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly so. It's really good, I think, for really all different types of verticals. But for dealers to kind of hear these distinctions, it's really, really important, so then they can take that even, no matter who they're working with, if they're not working with you guys yet I say yet, because it's important for people to understand kind of what's going on behind the scenes so that their you with some of these things, which is almost 99.9% of the time, the best way to do it. Sometimes in house you've been lucky to hire a ninja that would normally be working at an agency or running their own business. That's rare, and so it's really important for people to know that at the business level, you have to move beyond kind of eating the baby food as fast as possible and know how to eat solid food. Like, once you get up to like I can eat a steak, and the analogy obviously is that the knowledge that you accumulate will help you not only understand it but really make business decisions that you can feel confident in the outcomes.
Speaker 2:So no, so so I'm gonna have to steal that analogy there. You know, I'm gonna use that for comparing, uh, what we're bidding on top funnel versus bottom funnel. The big scary consideration yeah, an adult there, you can't get that steal away baby food, you know steal away, steal away.
Speaker 1:There's nothing new under the sun, man. So I got it from somebody else at some point in time and, um, it's better to operate out of abundance and scarcity, from my opinion. So take it. I want to ask you about how do you think businesses maybe should adjust bidding strategies when they're wanting to look for like a balance, because there's a lot of automation right that's happening inside of pmax. Um, what are your thoughts there?
Speaker 2:well fun fact you can't use manual on pmax. So there you go. That solves that problem. But so the other, the other, uh, the other possibilities for bidding strategies are going to have target, tcpa, target row as maximized inversions and maximized version value. So really they're just segmented into two different aspects. I'm going after value or I'm just I don't know what the value is. I'm going after maximizing the quantity of conversions.
Speaker 2:So generally, when you build a performance-based campaign, it's going to start off on Max, c, max Conversions and that's where Google is using it. It's like 70 million points of data it has on any given user to go out and find. All right, here are the conversions that were supplied to me. I need to find more Now. You know you want to keep in mind this and a lot of people forget about this when they're using maximized conversions and there will be changes and it will be less impacted the more first party data you have. I'm trying not to get too in the weeds here, but max conversions will perform best if it has 15 conversions over a 30-day period. Once max conversions, once a campaign is acquired at that data, then Google has a target and knows what to go after. So we tend to build out performance max kind of more gradual, collect conversion data and then layer it in once Google has a better target. Otherwise it's just going out trying to find those users, not really knowing what to do.
Speaker 2:So you start off on max conversion and you could switch into target CPA or you could work into more of a maximized conversion value. But if we're thinking about PMax for lead gen, then you're going to want to have a conversation with your client because when you increase the value, those actions will need a value assigned. But in lead gen sometimes those values are the same. So you can have good conversations with your clients and say, hey, sometimes you guys might not have enough staff you know, as an example and you want more often. You want more forms coming in through the website so that you can choose you know better times to call these guys back versus phone calls. So you could theoretically put a hundred dollar value on forms and a one dollar value on calls and run performance maximized conversion value bit strategy where it's going to go out and try to increase those forms because that has a higher value.
Speaker 2:So there's some things you can do there and I would recommend, before playing around with TCPA look at the best practices there because it requires a minimum of five times your average daily or your, your, uh, your 30-day cpa. It requires five times that as the average daily budget. It wants 20 times that and where for it to perform. So play around with tcpa and roas if you have enough. You know budget within the account, sometimes with smaller lead gen. You got two to three k a month to play with.
Speaker 1:Just stick, yeah yeah, yeah, that's, that's great advice. Let's, let's, let's talk a little bit about uh, maybe challenges, uh tactics to optimize what are are. Do you can you think of some common mistakes that advertisers are making when they're transitioning or starting to use pmax and if you can think of a few, maybe also how they might avoid them? Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2:So let's, what we can think about is the overall and I'm going to use the buzzword, the holistic structure of an account. And you know how are all these campaigns? And you're how, where are they? You have your campaign segmented, I hope, by levels of intent, right where you can capture and spend various stages in the funnel. Performance max is going to fill those gaps. But a lot of people will just build out that Performance Max provide it with its required amount of headlines and images and videos and descriptions in order for it to run, but they're ignoring the most key part, the function, the keyword behind PMAX, those search signals. So you'll have what's instead of an ad group in Performance Max, you can create multiple asset groups is what PMAX calls them asset groups within the campaign, which is essentially the equivalent of an ad group, and you're going to want to segment these by levels of intent, just like you do. Remember, you're mirroring that holistic approach in Performance Max.
Speaker 2:It could be used in multiple different ways, but a good practice is holistic approach in performance max. It could be used in multiple different ways, but a good practice is what am I doing with my campaign structure and why aren't I doing it at the asset group level within performance max, because you're able to compare asset group data, see what's performing well, what's not. There is the visibility within performance max to see which asset groups converting better, which one's spending more. You're able to see those things and then you know. That's where you would want to start looking into audience building so you can pair those asset groups and let's switch over to, let's say, a multifamily account, as an example, where you'll have floor plan, studio one, two, three bedrooms, so you can create custom segment audiences of one bedroom and 10, and then you can create an asset group paired with that custom segment, paired with first party data from the client of people who leased one bedrooms, and then paired with the search signals.
Speaker 2:You could pull data from your original one bedroom campaign of regular search best performers and then layer those in. So you see how you can kind of. There's the cross pollination PMAX can inform regular search and vice versa. Explanation pmax can inform regular search and vice versa. Um, so you know those are some of the things that you should be doing when launch performance max, because if you don't supply it with those, with the audience signals and the search signals, then it's just going to go out and spray and pray, and that's what everyone is scared of, so just don't do that yeah, you'll end up with a whole lot of nothing in the bucket, but you, you will have spent a lot to get it and that's aggravating to any business, that's for sure.
Speaker 1:How could advertisers optimize when? Because PMACs, of course. We mentioned this up top that you can upload creative assets right. So how can advertisers optimize the creative assets within PMACs in a way that helps them achieve higher engagement or better results?
Speaker 2:Again, it's going to be understanding Anytime that people ever kind of ask this question. It's good to just put yourself in the shoes of the user. Think about what you want to see and where you want to and how you would want to see it. So, as an example, if I'm building out Performance Max, that's complementing my whole campaign structure with regular search I may have an amenities campaign for that multifamily I'm talking about. That's showcasing how great the fitness area may be. So you're going to want to tailor your assets, your images, your videos and your headlines to capture that user. You're supplying it with the search signals.
Speaker 2:So don't just use that quick evergreen you know image leaderboard or whatever it is that says we're an apartment complex. Be granular with it. You're nurturing a journey and you need to provide the images and the creatives that help that user make that decision. And also just think about the frequency of which you know someone is seeing an ad. If you've got different ads with the same brand, the amount of trustworthiness and confidence it lends the user is what really drives the ultimate conversion, at least for this instance. So just make sure that you're segmenting your creative. Don't just throw all the same stuff in and then you're able to access report on how that creative performs. So spend time A-B testing. Take a look at that performance. Fight with whatever KPIs you're able to. Pmax does report on how that created performs. So spend time A-B testing. Take a look at that performance. Fight with whatever KPIs you know you're using and pull it if it's bad and add more if it's good.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's good advice and it's a good example. In multifamily there's so many of the newer, more modern properties, have so many amenities and you can tell some of them really are trying to cater to a persona or maybe a handful of people that you know. It could be anything from how pet friendly they are to how eco-conscious they are, to how fitness conscious they are. That's a really good thing, just to always keep top of mind and and really everything that a company is doing, probably from a content marketing and all the creative that they make. Um, the more that you have your eye on that and keeping it focused on that end user, your actual target audience, the better it's going to perform when you throw it into pmax, obviously. And for dealers I this is just a little extra nugget, and tell me if you would or your actual target audience, the better it's going to perform when you throw it into PMAX, obviously. And for dealers this is just a little extra nugget and tell me if you would agree.
Speaker 1:But I think car dealers have always had, unfortunately, a tendency to continue to kind of repeat what's already been done. It's like so newspaper ads that included pictures the old, old old days became today's display ad became today's right and there are still a lot of ads that end up in there too and, like you said, even do some split tests to find out what's actually driving better results. I hate to say, don't be lazy, but it's like, don't mail it in. When it comes to the creative side of the assets that go into PMAX, because I think it can actually be one of the elements that separate those achieving better results than they would even expect versus ones who are probably thinking that they could be doing better and it could come down to well, you're not really doing anything to innovate or be different or test different variables within that creative asset.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and it is an evolving machine. So the more that it's collecting this data, the fairness is going to change. A new competitor enters in and, you know, maybe the PMACs might back off for a bit and you got to start looking at your auction sites. So yeah, there's definitely definitely a lot more labor that you can pull than it apparently, than it is apparent for sure.
Speaker 1:What role does audience segmentation? You mentioned some of this stuff in PMAX. Maybe do a little coverage of that again, because audience segmentation is really actually important across all sides of digital marketing. How does it wrap into success when it comes to PMAX campaigns, especially when what we've talked about there's limitations on how much reporting and how transparent all of it is?
Speaker 2:Yeah, honestly, this one's kind of a simple answer, just because when you're segmenting your audiences you're just trying not to confuse the machine. So you're really just trying to. You know there's two parts. I guess You're not trying to confuse the machine by saying, hey, here's all of these things, go after it. But you did it. You know you've got it all under one group, one asset group or something.
Speaker 2:You've got every part versus used Exactly or even, let's say, acquisitions. So there's a lot that people aren't doing with their first party data to feed the funnel of their used inventory by marketing to people who you already sold vehicles, to Grab that first-party data from whatever time period you have there. And then this is just as an example. So then you'll have your new and used over here and your asset grouping and this is also what can be mirrored in your typical campaign structures and then have an acquisitions asset group or build out a mirror PMACs. That's acquisitions, so you can file and budget appropriately. But you've got your audiences segmented based off of the layers of intent you know, and then that that's when you know, all right, well, what messaging captures that intent and that's where you modify it. So it's really just the same sort of logic you're using with your creative, same sort of logic you're using with other campaigns within your account. But you know, spend time with it because I always think about this meme I saw it's like a meme format where it's like an old lady and then you're helping the old lady and she's saying something like oh, I remember when you know X was, oh, let's get you to bed, grandma. I modify it where she was saying oh, I remember there were these things called keywords that you could bid on. And it's okay, let's get you to. And I actually modified it for Mike at that point. All right, mike, let's get you to bed.
Speaker 2:So yeah, pay attention to your audiences, spend time there, you know, and you can. So many people are not doing things like when you build a custom segment audience, there's criteria. You can expand on that audience. If you look at it, you've got the bucket of and but, or if you do a combined audience, you can narrow that audience. You can build multiple custom segments and say that they and is the criteria for combined, whereas a regular custom segment is or which expands on an audience. So that's where you know I talk about getting people talk about saying something out loud and then their phone showing them later. You know you can get what would be qualify as the the creepy targeting.
Speaker 1:You start getting into that right, because you can really narrow it down to the true user when you caption that time yeah, very interesting and I love your thoughts there on even though to some people it might seem simplistic of new and used.
Speaker 1:But the acquisition side. In the last three to five years that's become really a hot part of business for dealers and I started telling dealers when they were coming back into starting to spend more post-COVID and returning to okay, we've got to actually start putting some paid media campaigns back together. Even before that I started to say you shouldn't have really shut it all down. You should have actually started some new messaging around, offering your trade-up tool as part of your advertising and or offering you want to buy cars, sell us your car, sell us your car, sell us your car. You literally could build a whole segment around that part of your business, landing people with the copy, with the creative, everything you do that you can land people in that part, because that's also a profit center for dealers. It's not just the sales of the new vehicles and the sales of the used vehicles, it's also the servicing of all those vehicles. A lot of people don't realize that the average service writer actually is responsible for more gross profit in a dealership than their top salesperson.
Speaker 1:It's crazy. But that acquisition piece too, it's just very interesting. I think dealers always get kind of jazzed about learning like, oh, maybe we should do that, Especially when there can be fatigue around. Oh, we've been doing something like Google AdWords, Google Ads, PMAX, vehicle ads. When you've been doing something for so long and there's two schools of thought around it, oftentimes one side is is deep in their knowledge and their understanding and the other side is really just trying to throw confusion and pull you into something else because they want you to spend your money yeah yeah is usually what happens.
Speaker 1:So last couple of questions. This has been a really good conversation. A lot of really good stuff set. I want to ask you a little bit on future. Ai is huge. We were talking about it even before we started to record. Ai and automation although those things are really different in my mind evolve, how do you see the paid search, the PPC landscape, how do you see that maybe changing over the next two years? This does not have to be specific to PMAX.
Speaker 2:Just your general thoughts. Yeah, yeah, you know that might take a whole nother podcast for you and I to dig in. I'll give you quick answers here on this one. You know, I definitely think that a lot of people have a sense of fear surrounding it. I, I think, adapting, embracing all of the little ways that you can use ai to improve your workflow, even eliminate certain sprint work, things like that I think you know it's probably going to be the same advice you're just hearing from anyone else when you're saying, like you know, have the courage to adapt and to embrace it.
Speaker 2:Um, but I would say, a little little bit. I'm a little bit, um, concerned about the way that generative ai appears on the surf. So I would say, just, I'm going to be paying close attention to that, especially when it comes what? What is google? What carrot is google going to use when it comes to targeting using generative ai over there, um, where it's only going to be performance max and we don't even get to see the ad anymore. They just, you know, I'm curious to see what's going to happen there.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, I am, I am, I am too. I really am. I think it's going to be quite interesting. I don't know if you would have. You don't have to have a top three. If you have a top three, that's great. This is kind of one of those top three of feel overwhelmed, uh, by changes, whether it's they still feel like pmax is new to them or their knowledge of and they're really under. Their understanding of pmax was kind of shallow, maybe until they've listened to all the great things that you've shared on this episode. But a lot of times in it's not always even the marketers, oftentimes it's the businesses that they just feel buried by changes and new things and all that. What would you say are your maybe top three or your maybe best tip for people just kind of staying ahead of the curve when it comes to paid search?
Speaker 2:This one is so simple and it's astounding to me how few people I've met that actually use it enough. But just post to Reddit. You used to have a combi. I love Reddit. Yeah, post to Reddit. You start having a comb through. I love Reddit.
Speaker 2:Subscribe to a couple PPC or subreddits, comb through. There's so much good data and there's so many people that are going to be jerks to you and that's fine because you're going to get quick answers and you're going to realize if you ask a dumb question, you're not being baited by anyone, not just Reddit. Know there's multiple forums. Spend some time posting, uh, checking out. You know various. What's the latest podcast? What's something interesting on youtube?
Speaker 2:You know um, and, and spend maybe 45 minutes a day or 30 minutes with a cup of coffee just looking at what's new there, because it gives me so much confidence whenever I find something that I can actually leverage and implement into our workflow. You know and I have often so anytime you're feeling a little bit kind of lost uh, just just see what the community's saying. Make a post about it. Hey, I'm feeling lost. What's the new? That you would try with pmax? You know um and I and I'm on there, I'm in the. I'm in the subreddits answering some of those questions for you guys too, yeah, and then I would say that one, one of the ones that I find new account managers and this may be more like an agency side thing, but mistake a lot of people do or make is that they check a lot of boxes with the client but they're scared to ask about the negative stuff.
Speaker 2:Find out what an unqualified lead is. Spend time talking to your clients. Find out what an unqualified lead is. Spend time talking to your clients. Find out what's actually important to them. When you do that, when you can kind of build up just that trust with them by you know them, feeling like you actually care and understand it, it's going to create more of a better environment for you to work in. It's going to create more of a better environment for you to work in um, and that that's just really going to help you stay ahead of the curve when you're seeing what the boots on the ground opinion is like you know, get feedback, I guess I love that advice because a lot of people are afraid to uh, run to the hot zone and and I understand that very much it it takes some courage to run to the hot zone.
Speaker 1:It does. But what you're saying and I completely agree with it is where you will get the most profound and real, authentic learning and you will get it faster there than anywhere else. And it might be uncomfortable, it might, as a result, make your skin thicker, but you'll come away with tangible things that you can work on and improve immediately, as opposed to trying to go as far around it as possible. It's just ultimately not worth it Immediately as opposed to trying to go as far around it as possible. Yeah, it's just ultimately not worth it. And also, if where that takes you, the hot zone takes you closer to maybe the client that's experiencing the issue If that's the case as well almost always raises not just the trust level but the respect level and it helps the reputation. If you're a marketer, if you're the agency side, and you've got to run to the hot zone to figure those things out, yeah, you might take some unfriendly fire. It may be very uncomfortable.
Speaker 2:But it also sorry to interrupt, but it also helps you build those defensible positions, because you're going straight to the source of truth there and yeah, yes, yeah, just 100% straight to the source of truth there and yeah, yes, yeah, just fantastic.
Speaker 1:This has been a great conversation. Seth, I really appreciate you taking the time to be on the podcast today. Where can people reach you? I never want to be too presumptuous. Maybe that's LinkedIn for you, but maybe you'd send people elsewhere. Where's the best place for people to connect with you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, find me on LinkedIn, shoot us a message. Premieronlinemarketingcom. Connect with me if you have any questions. I'm always happy to kind of discuss any of this stuff. I love expanding out on the network. But yeah, find me on LinkedIn or check out our website your time.
Speaker 1:Like Seth mentioned, you can go to premieronlinemarketingcom and learn all about what they're doing as a company. I always highly recommend people that are listening to the episodes to make sure that you go onto LinkedIn and look up Seth. You'll find him there easily. You'll also find the business, the company page for Premier Online Marketing, and you can find all their employees. I highly recommend you connecting and following all of them because they put out amazing content. They are true experts in this realm, as opposed to just theorists who can talk a good game but really don't deliver much, and that's why I'm a big fan and glad to host their podcast. So until next time, we will just say thank you for joining us for another episode of the podcast. See you again real soon. Thanks, Sean. Thank you.