Performance Max is Google's big push to more automated campaigns. It's been available for several months now, and many marketers are finding it generally helpful.
But — Google Ads trainer Jyll Saskin Gales has found a potentially devastating issue with that format's audience targeting… an issue that could severely cripple your campaign's performance.
She spoke to Today in Digital Marketing podcast host Tod Maffin:
Usually, when you create a Google ads campaign, you can decide if you want to only target people in Toronto, or target people who are located in Toronto or interested in Toronto. And of course, most of us don't want the interested in we just want the located in.
What I have discovered is that [Performance Max campaigns do not let you turn off “interested in.]
I actually saw with one business owner that had set Canada as the targeting for their campaign, and Google Ads said all impressions, clicks, and conversions were from Canada.
But when I looked in Google Analytics, I saw that actually 60% of traffic from this campaign was coming from users in India and Pakistan — not Canada. And it should be noted, this business owner does not do business in India or Pakistan.
To be clear — even though you might specify Canada (or any country) as your target, Google will actually display your ad in all sorts of countries.
Saskin Gales, who spent six years at Google and now offers digital marketing training, says there is a workaround:
You can add location exclusions to a Performance Max campaign. You wouldn't think you'd need to exclude countries if they weren't in your targeting normally, with [the non p-max] Google Ads, you wouldn't need to. But how we solved it for this business was to add India and Pakistan as excluded locations for their campaign.
It's also helpful, she suggests, to ensure you have Google Analytics set up to track a segment built from your p-max campaigns. “That's how I discovered this issue, you can look at the landing pages and get a lot more insight from Google Analytics than from within Google Ads itself.”
Related Links:
- Jyll's “Inside Google Ads” Training Program
- More About Jyll
- The Today in Digital Marketing podcast and newsletter
