In the latest episode of Insider Secrets for Digital Marketing Success, host Steffen Horst sits down with Navah Hopkins, brand evangelist at Optmyzr, to kick off a three-part series on how small businesses can grow through digital advertising. Navah brings over 15 years of experience in digital marketing, offering actionable strategies for small businesses to optimize their Google Ads campaigns using PMAX.
What is Google PMAX?
PMAX is Google’s all-in-one campaign type that unifies various ad formats and placements, such as Search, Display, YouTube, and Shopping, into a single, automated campaign. It simplifies the process of running ads across Google’s ecosystem by allowing advertisers to set a budget, input creative assets, and let Google’s AI do the heavy lifting.
While this automation makes it easier for businesses with limited resources, it also means giving up some control over how the budget is allocated. This balance between automation and manual control is one of the key themes discussed in the podcast episode.
Key Takeaways for Small Businesses:
1. Achieving 50+ Conversions in 30 Days
One of the most critical points Navah emphasizes is the importance of achieving at least 50 conversions per month to ensure the PMAX algorithm has enough data to optimize effectively. Without this minimum number, the campaign may struggle to perform well. For small businesses with limited budgets, hitting this conversion threshold may seem daunting, but there are ways to boost conversions:
• Use micro-conversions: Track actions like phone calls, form fills, or even engagement with content to help boost your conversion count.
• Optimize your landing pages: Ensure that your website is set up to capture leads effectively. Even small tweaks to your user experience can lead to significant improvements.
2. The Power of Video in PMAX Campaigns
PMAX relies heavily on visual content, especially video, to engage audiences across Google’s various platforms. Navah stresses the importance of having video assets ready for PMAX campaigns, as they tend to drive better results, especially on YouTube and Display.
For small businesses, creating professional videos may seem out of reach, but Google’s platform offers tools to create simple, effective video content. Additionally, using stock footage or even smartphone-shot videos can be a cost-effective way to generate engaging content.
3. Balancing Automation and Manual Management
While PMAX automates many aspects of campaign management, it’s essential for businesses to maintain some level of manual control. Navah suggests using exclusions (e.g., excluding branded terms) and setting budget caps to ensure that the campaign stays aligned with your overall strategy.
However, for small businesses, the key is to keep campaigns simple and manageable. Navah advises focusing on a small number of campaigns or ad groups that can be easily maintained. This reduces complexity and helps businesses gather data faster, making it easier to identify what’s working and what needs improvement.
4. Using Dynamic Search Ads (DSA)
Navah also recommends leveraging Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) to help Google crawl your website and match your ads with relevant searches. This can be a powerful way to learn how your customers search and can inform your keyword strategies for traditional search campaigns.
Real-World Examples and Success Stories
During the episode, Navah shares examples of small businesses that have successfully used PMAX to grow their digital presence, even with limited budgets. She highlights the importance of being flexible and adapting strategies as you gather data, ensuring that campaigns are constantly optimized for success.
Is PMAX Right for Your Small Business?
One of the key messages from Navah is that PMAX isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. While it offers significant advantages for many small businesses, such as automation and access to multiple ad formats, it’s not ideal for every situation. Businesses should weigh the benefits of automation against the need for control and consider whether they have the creative assets (like video) necessary to make PMAX campaigns successful.
Looking Ahead: What’s Next in the Series?
This episode is just the beginning of our three-part series on small business growth through digital advertising. In Part 2, we’ll dive into how small businesses should approach advertising, which channels to use, and what common pitfalls to avoid.
If you’re a small business looking to grow through digital advertising, don’t miss the rest of the series. Subscribe to Insider Secrets for Digital Marketing Success to get the latest insights from industry experts like Navah Hopkins.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Intro: This is Performance Delivered Insider Secrets for Digital Marketing Success with Stephan Horst.
[00:00:09] Steffen Horst: Today, we are kicking off a three part series on how small businesses can grow for digital advertising. In part one of the series, we will discuss Google Search, particularly PMAX. Part two will focus on how small businesses must approach advertising to be successful.
Which channels they have at their disposal and which pitfalls to avoid. Finally, in part three, we're going to look at it from a business operations perspective. Here to speak with me and unpack all of that is Navar Hopkins, brand evangelist at Optimizer, an award winning turnkey PPC management suite built on a foundation of various meshing AI and machine learning power.
Navar has over 15 years of digital marketing experience and has worked for companies such as WordStream, NSE Digital, and at Zuma. She has a passion for innovation fueled by a hybrid of strategic partnership, data analysis, and consumer engagement. Navar is a serial entrepreneur, SEO, SEM philosopher, blogger, content strategist, And bounty hunter on a business development dance floor.
Now, welcome to the show.
[00:01:11] Navah Hopkins: Thank you so much for having me. There's one more title. I am a dog mom. I have three adorable dogs and there is the possibility they might make an appearance full we'll see, but yeah, no, very, very excited to be with you.
[00:01:28] Steffen Horst: Wonderful. Well, before we explore today's topics, I'd like to learn more about you.
Tell us about how you got started in your career and what led you to becoming a brand evangelist and optimizer.
[00:01:38] Navah Hopkins: Sure. So I actually really wanted to be an English teacher from the third grade up until I started going to university for it. I was dead set. I am going to teach high school English. That is what I'm going to do.
It's going to be great. And then I realized that with the U. S. education system, I would be both poor and ineffective going being an actual teacher. And I had a great conversation with a family member that let me know, Nava, your DNA is marketing. Go into marketing. Stop fighting who you are. Just, just go be a marketer.
And ever since then, I've, I've had a lot of fun helping brands. I've worked in, for software companies. I've worked in agency. I've worked in house. But I really have a deep love of software because of this idea of the virtue of scale, that my brain can help maybe one or two people in a conversation, but if we can scale that in software, it's really powerful.
A big proponent of the virtue of scale is my now boss, Fred Vallis. I actually met Fred while I was working at WordStream, and we had kind of a fun, friendly, initially rivalry, but then very much a deep friendship, and he asked me to do some consulting that turned into a full time position at Optmyzr.
So my role there, I get to work with the product team, I get to work with the marketing team, the customer success team, the sales team. But most importantly, I get to share insights learned externally and then bring feedback back to help make sure that we're building the best possible tool. So the PMAX conversation is very timely because that is definitely a source of questions we'll say.
[00:03:10] Steffen Horst: And confusion sometimes I have to say.
[00:03:12] Navah Hopkins: Yes. And confusion. That's true.
[00:03:14] Steffen Horst: Now, PaidSearch shortly has changed a lot since its beginning. I mean, I've been in there since the early 2000s, and I remember when you could buy PaidSearch plugs for a cent.
[00:03:24] Navah Hopkins: Yep.
[00:03:25] Steffen Horst: You know. And you could tweak and fine tune your search campaigns and squeeze almost like the last bit out of your budget.
[00:03:33] Navah Hopkins: Ruthless efficiency. Yeah. Ruthless efficiency.
[00:03:37] Steffen Horst: Today's agency have kind of lost many of these, or even businesses have lost these kind of methods and insights that help generate great results in the past. What does that mean for agencies that manage search campaigns for small businesses? which have less budget than bigger companies and hence are not collecting as much information or not as much information as quickly as when you have a bigger budget.
[00:04:00] Navah Hopkins: So all is not lost. This is a bit of a spoiler for some of the studies and so I'm not sure when this is going to air so we may have already released some of the studies but it may be a spoiler. We actually found that low spending accounts of sub 10, 000 per month don't actually struggle as much as we perceive that they do.
The key to a successful account is not actually the spend, it's the conversions. If you're able to hit at least 50 conversions in a 30 day period, whether those are true sales or whether those are micro conversions and you do different conversion values, you will see success with a smaller budget. The problem is, a lot of smaller brands aren't really confident in putting in a conversion value to actually help the algorithm know where to put the budget.
So the reason why small budgets can feel like they're a problem is that we're working off of the less efficient, Conversion versus conversion value metric. And on top of that, if you're going after keyword concepts, you're going after audience targets that they don't quite fit your budget anyway, and you're not really helping the algorithm with understanding what your bids should be with bid floors or caps.
You're going to run into trouble. So the reason why I think performance max struggles on top of that is that there's a deep seated fear of including branded in performance max. And I think one of the things that brands need to consider, whether it's performance max or not, is how can I hit that 50 conversion minimum?
In a 30 day period, because whether you're talking about manual bidding, because I was in those same days of micromanaging bids, and I had all my little rules in my head that if I have a super conservative bid, I go very aggressive on the adjustments and like really thinking about how to speak to the algorithm.
The way we speak to the algorithm now is by the conversions with conversion values. So how can we hit those 50 conversions? So some suggestions, take a look at your secondary conversion actions. If you don't know what those are, within Google, there are two types of conversion actions, a primary, which is going to actually influence your reporting your bidding, it actually weighs into everything, as well as Just being a useful action like you're denoting it's useful and then there's a secondary conversion action, which will be tracked But it's not gonna actually do anything.
It's kind of like when you observe an audience It's not doing anything is just telling you that it happened. Take a look at some of your secondary conversion actions And see if there's an opportunity to turn some of them into primary, if you can then follow through with conversion values. If you're not going to do that, then obviously stick with just the core primary conversion actions, don't, don't rock the boat there.
But if you're really struggling to hit that 50 conversions per day, that's the problem to solve. Or not per day, 50 conversions per 30 day period.
[00:07:02] Steffen Horst: Yeah. And so can you give an example of what a primary and a secondary conversion might be just to wrap your head around that?
[00:07:09] Navah Hopkins: Yeah. So you might have primary action for a phone call, you might have a primary conversion action for a form fill, but you might also know that when you get someone on the phone, you close them.
You are so charming. Like they talk to you, they're going to give you their business. So you might have a conversion value. Of 50 for the phone call, but you might only have a conversion value of 30 for the form fill, because even though the form fill is useful as potentially a lead, there might be a lag in response time, so they fall through, or there might be some sort of, like, they're not quite a good fit, or there's people that just like to fill out forms to sell you services, and so they're not even a lead at all.
So just having those, those different values is really important. Now, an example of a secondary conversion action that might happen on that page. Is someone reading a testimonial or review of your services that is super positive? Or that helps qualify that they'll be a good customer. So, for example, one of the projects I actually did way back when at Hennessy Digital was we found out that there were a lot of leads coming through that were not quite qualified to be a customer.
So we actually ran a page that was a question of, do you have a case? And that page did so well on the page, so they ended up making it a page on a lot of the organic, the main sites domain. So an example here would be, if you were to include that as a widget of, do you have a case, something like a calculator, where it's not actually a form fill, but it's a highly useful action.
That could be a potential secondary conversion action that you want to track, but it could also be a good candidate for a micro conversion if you're having trouble hitting that 50 conversion minimum.
[00:08:55] Steffen Horst: Yeah. Now talking about the number of minimum conversions, so Google talks about 30, I think recently they talked about 15 are required.
Why are you talking about 50?
[00:09:05] Navah Hopkins: So I'm talking about 50 because I get to work at Optmyzr and I get to look at thousands of accounts and see like the big book of data, but I also am actually following in the footsteps of the amazing Mike Ryan. who did a great study over at SMEC. And the reason why I wanted to share this, is that it applies to lead gen just as much as it applies to e commerce.
So that when the SMEC data came out, and they revealed a really, it was a great in depth study around PMAX, that it actually required at least 60 conversions in a 30 day period in order to be successful. I was, really intrigued because that is essentially double the amount that Google outright says. And so when we looked at the data, and this is again, spoiling a bit, depending on when this comes out, there was no question that every single bidding strategy, whether you're looking at manual bidding, whether you're looking at, Maximize clicks, whether you're looking at target impression share, maximize conversions, maximize conversion value, so on and so forth.
They all really need 50 plus to do well. But what I found really fascinating is that the jump from sub 25 conversions to 25 to 50, like before you actually hit that 50th conversion, there were times where the sub 25 did okay. But then it would kind of fail a little bit when it was in that 25 to 50. So that's where I think a lot of our current SMBs are is that they're in that in between period.
And so they feel like I don't have enough conversions for smart bidding when ironically they're close or like they do. It's just that this is where there's more volatility. So if you can hit that 50 plus, mark, you will see a lot more stability in your performance. And even if it feels like you're putting in incorrect information, you're helping the algorithm understand.
It's kind of like, so I mentioned I'm a dog mom. I have three adorable dogs. They each need different forms of correction and treats and enjoyment. I have one who is super prey driven, I have one who is super play driven, and I have one who is super food driven. And knowing that I can anticipate what they'll need, So if I were to apply the same amount of treats to the dog that is play driven as the one that is tree driven, like, they're not going to care.
So it's really just about understanding, think about the Google and the Google algorithm as a puppy. And the puppy has very specific ways that it learns and it needs and it builds on itself. So if you can keep giving it that same amount of information, in a stable way where you trust the data and you're feeding in as much as you can that is good.
Now I acknowledge, and I want to make sure that we talk about this, We are living in the privacy first world where not all conversions will be tracked. And you have to wrestle with the conversation of actually getting consent from your people to feed in that information. And do you want to share that information with Google?
Like, do you feel comfortable sharing your profit numbers? Do you feel comfortable sharing all of that? So we're in this weird place where we know what the right answer is. We know that We do need to give that information, but do we feel comfortable doing that? And that's the real problem. I think Google needs to help us solve for SMBs where SMBs.
often get taken advantage of by not the best practitioners that maybe take advantage or like they do kind of shady practices. So I think it's really important that we talk about what is needed in Google. Like what are the fundamental things that are needed? And then brands, you can decide how much do you want to opt into those versus how much are you okay having less than ideal performance, but you're retaining your data or you're retaining your privacy and things like that.
[00:12:55] Steffen Horst: Obviously it depends on the goal.
[00:12:57] Navah Hopkins: Correct. Yeah.
[00:12:58] Steffen Horst: Company advertising, right? If your goal is to sell product at a specific, I don't know, row is, or you need a certain number of leads at a certain number of cost per lead, because you know, that kind of gives you X amount of sales down on the sales funnel.You're a little bit more reliant to optimize your campaign towards those KPIs.
[00:13:17] Navah Hopkins: hundred percent. The one thing I just, I need to get on the record. I don't understand why performance max. is so associated with e commerce that legion is so afraid of it. I think one of the things that gets in the way is that max conversion value is so inherently better at driving success for performance max and legion is just so afraid of using maximized conversion value.
So one of the things that we'll talk about this when we talk about business ops is actually solving those equations of what are each of your conversions worth.
[00:13:53] Steffen Horst: Now, before we go deeper into what you just kind of touched on, like, let's kind of look at what is available these days to kind of small business, right?
You said, you know, a PMAX probably all the way to probably 10, 000 monthly investment, but what are businesses supposed to do that spend less than 10, 000? Is there the traditional, the old way of doing paid search where, where you don't rely so much on the AI and you, you set off multiple. You know, ad groups within a campaign that break everything out to detail.
You have, you know, different match types that you should use. Is that the solution for them?
[00:14:27] Navah Hopkins: It depends. So classic answer. I think one of the big hurdles is that video and visual content is so incredibly important today in terms of how you engage and to be frank, where Google's investing a lot of its energy that if a SMB.
Is going to only do one thing. I would actually say the most important thing they could do is to invest in video resources that they feel confident and comfortable. We talked earlier about the cost of a click for search ads. YouTube is super cheap. Super cheap engagement. absolutely can drive value. And in terms of how people like to consume content, more and more is shifting to video.
So I think that's definitely has to be a part of it. But in terms of structure, yes, there is a place for engaging with keywords, there is a place for using really surgical negatives. And when I say surgical negatives, that means using ad group level negatives, as well as campaign level negatives, so that you're eliminating waste, you're directing your budget where you want it to go.
Like there's a whole number of things you can do. But as an SMB, you also have to consider how much time do you have to dedicate. So the structure that you build needs to be something you can support. So those highly segmented structures that would have 100, 200 campaigns with maybe 3 to 20 ad groups per campaign based off of weekend or weekday, based off of device, based off of segmentations.
That's great if you can maintain it, but nine times out of ten, you're not going to have the time. So a good way to think about it is, number one, dynamic search ads. Dynamic search ads are great because you can plug in your already beautiful website and actually see how Google sees you, so you can see what targets It identifies and see what search volume it associates with those targets.
You also will get a sense of what creative Google would pull from your existing content. So if you really don't agree with it, that's a good way for you to understand, hey, maybe my site isn't ready for primetime yet. I need to go back to the drawing board. The other really useful thing about DSA is that it will teach you how your people search.
While it is 100 percent true the search terms report No longer is the full width and breadth of the report. You still can get some really good ideas that can then teach you which keywords you should bid on. Now, I actually am okay with limited broad match so long as you're using it in a limited way.
What do I mean by that? That would be data acquisition. So you might have one or two broad match keywords in an ad group by themselves where their whole job is to acquire the data of how are your people searching that you're not already capturing with exact match keywords in your other ad groups. And you would have every other keyword as a negative in that broad match ad group, because the whole point is to gather data.
It's not to spend all your money.
That is a useful way to get kind of the best of both worlds of leaning into the data and the volume and kind of that learning that you'll need while still having some protections. And then I also need to give a shameless plug for maximize clicks with a bid cap. So one of the reasons why I like the spinning strategy so much For low spending accounts Is you can really understand what keyword concepts fit in your budget and you can also kind of get a sense of what are the variants that would fit better.
And based off of the bid cap that you set. So as a general rule, I will, I don't like bids that exceed 10 percent of my daily budget in non branded search because a 10 percent conversion rate is really good. And then if you're asking for better, then obviously that's setting yourself up to fail. So if you go ahead and set a.
10 percent of your daily budget bid cap, that will help you understand what your keyword concepts cost and should you change them out.
One tactic I used to use back in the day when like close friends were first starting to come about is I would actually bid on the misspelling that was cheaper and I'd pick up the regular keyword and it was great because you'd pay like maybe 20, 30 percent less, but it's doing the same job.
The problem is If you truly need the keyword or you truly need the target, you're not going to get it. So I'm curious, what do you think? Is it still a place for keywords and hyperstructure or Is that day done?
[00:18:53] Steffen Horst: Yeah. I think especially for small businesses with limited budget, I couldn't agree more. We are thinking more around, let's have one campaign with maybe a handful of ad groups and keep it really concise.
It doesn't work having kind of breaking it out a lot. You're not collecting enough information in each of these ad groups and campaigns to make decision on what works and what doesn't work. Or it takes much longer to get the information to make the decision. I'm in full agreement with what, what you just said in regards to kind of don't break it out or keep it more concise.
And then when you get to the point where you can use PMAX, obviously, then look at that, you kind of shift over to that and for a business, they probably struggle to get kind of certain information out of the PMAX campaign that we as agency gets. Yeah, but you know, that's why we're getting paid at the end, right?
To, to kind of do the things on top of what, what a normal person can do within a Google platform.
[00:19:51] Navah Hopkins: And I think it's important to remember that PMAX is still kind of in beta. It's not the 10, 15, 20 year old product. Depending on which part of Google ads you're talking about that other parts are, we finally have asset group level reporting that took what, two, three years in order to apply negatives in a reasonable way at the campaign level, you have to fill out a form, you don't, you can't do that in the UI.
So when you're using a tool that is still in development. It's really important that you build in risk assessment and risk protection. So what do I mean by that? When you're setting a budget for PMAX, you want to set a budget that is a budget that you are okay not having full control over. So typically, that means It's not your bread and butter budget.
It's not your, this is really critical that I can say exactly where this went budget. This is your wild and crazy idea budget. So I typically will budget somewhere between 20 to 30 percent for PMAX. One of the findings that's actually kind of interesting, and again, it's just spoiling all of our studies on this webinar, but we looked at the data for our customers and we broke it down by brackets of I'm spending less than 10%, 10 to 25%, 25 to 50 percent and more than 50 percent of their budget.
And what's really fascinating is that more than half of the accounts that we included in the study put more than 50 percent of their budget into PMAX. And, uh, I thought that was really fascinating because typically when you think about PMAX, it is taking the bias out of the equation, it is meant to be a power pair with your search and all that, so the fact that 50 percent is going into PMAX, Two things need to be true for that to be a good idea.
Thing number one is that you actually have video at your disposal. You are prepared to bring video. Video is really critical for PMAX to be useful. The other thing that needs to be true is that you have your conversion so dialed in that there is no possible way that the lack of control is going to come back to bite you.
So what do I mean by that? Yes, you can exclude your brand. Yes, you can include exclusions. Yes, you can have all of those pieces. But at the end of the day, the budget is going to go where it's going to go. You have no real concrete say over whether it goes to YouTube or to Discover or to Search or to Shopping or you have no say over that.
So, if 50, more than 50 percent is going to go to a bias free investment, You just, you need to trust the controls that are there. And that comes down to, you have the creative that it needs, which is video, and you have the tools to make it succeed, which is conversion efficacy.
[00:22:48] Steffen Horst: Yeah. Take one little step back.
We talk so much about PMAX, and I don't know, there might be some people listening who's like,
[00:22:55] Navah Hopkins: what is this thing?
[00:22:57] Steffen Horst: Yeah. What is this? Can you talk a little bit about what is PMAX? How is it different to kind of the old way of doing paid search, so to speak?
[00:23:05] Navah Hopkins: Yeah. So PMAX is pretty much every single campaign type rolled into one where you say, Google, here's how much budget I have.
Here's what I want to achieve. Here's some creative, here's some general guidance about who my best people are. You go figure out where that budget should go, and you go invest those dollars where you think they'll do the most good. Why that's important is search campaigns typically have very specific metrics.
We're very used to seeing click through rates that are going to be three or five percent. Whereas display, you might see a click theory that's sub 1% and you're like, that is totally fine. On average CPCs, your search CPC might be $50, whereas your YouTube CPC might be a dollar 50. Like there's gonna be a a lot of within breadth there.
So I think one of the major P max considerations, kind of those initiations is that you need to get used to the idea. That the metrics that you're used to for standalone campaigns are not going to translate into PMAX. Now there are some amazing scripts, Mike Rhodes has some great ones, Mike Ryan has some great ones, Niels has some great ones, Optmyzr has some great ones, that will break down your performance max budget distribution so you can see the metrics by channel.
But it doesn't change the fact that out of the box, Google really wants you to think about it as general performance. They don't want you to get stuck in the weeds, thinking about how each campaign is running. With that said, if your budget is on the lower side, you will typically see more visual content because that's the inventory you can afford.
So if you're really only loading in text ads and search assets, but your budget is low, that's going to be a recipe for disaster because you're not going to have enough resources runway for search, and then you don't have the assets for visual. So I know I've mentioned video a lot. YouTube is a really critical placement as is discover, as is display.
Make sure that you have those in play.
[00:25:14] Steffen Horst: Now, you already talked about some of the pitfalls. And I'm from a conversation here. I think it's clear. It's like you're losing control. You literally say, here's my budget. Here's kind of where I'm after, this is my product, et cetera. Here's some ads and some creative and I'll go out and find me, find me my customer, so to speak, right.
How can businesses kind of still gain some control? You know, I mean, you talked about scripts, obviously, but are there any other ways to maintain or gain some control because Google does that obviously, because they want to make it easy for businesses to advertise with not much knowledge, right?
[00:25:54] Navah Hopkins: So one of the things.
I'm pulling it up now as we speak so I can give you the exact number. There was a really fascinating little trend on LinkedIn recently where people were talking about changes to the Performance Max exclusion form. And so I ran a little poll just to see What is, how are people using the form? And only 45 percent have been using the form since the beginning.
21 percent of 116 people, I should say, um, 21 percent say that the form didn't meet their needs and 16 percent didn't know it existed. So. I think one of the major pitfalls is that people don't do the thing, or they aren't aware of the thing. So the number one piece I would include is the form for exclusions.
Know that exclusions don't always help performance. You have to be intelligent about what you're saying to exclude. The other major one is branded exclusions. This is a debate topic. Yes, PMAX will likely cannibalize your branded if you let it stay in there. No, it's not necessarily a guarantee that you want to exclude it.
You have to be mindful. Are you Picking up that branded traffic somewhere else, are you hitting your minimum conversions without it? If the answer is no, then you should include it and then just don't have branded anywhere else. Like make your branded terms exclusions in everywhere else. But otherwise, absolutely make sure that you are including your branded terms and maybe even your competitor terms as exclusion so that you're not wasting your budget there.
Another lever of control is the types of assets that you upload. So I keep harping on video because video, by and large, helps ROAS and CPA when it's present in an asset group over all other. Asset groups. So I cannot overstate the importance of have video present because if you have those videos present, like essentially what you're doing with every asset that you include is you're saying, I am able to say yes to this placement.
So Google doesn't have to compromise with you and put you in these kind of weird placements. It can really give you the best of its inventory. The final thing I'll say I'm rambling a little bit on this. Just be mindful that PMAX is not about control. It's about freeing yourself from bias. So the best control you can give yourself is to set a budget that you are okay not having full control over.
If you need control because either your finance team demands it, or your boss demands it, or your client demands it, or whatever, PMAX shouldn't really be more than 20 30 percent of your budget, maybe even less than that. And that's totally fair. But you have to know what you're getting into when you're using PMAX.
And you shouldn't try to turn PMAX into a super controlled thing, because that's not, What it is. If you want super control, run standalone campaigns.
[00:29:04] Steffen Horst: Interesting. Now, Google is able to create creatives, obviously not video creative. How good is what Google does there? And especially for small businesses, right?
I mean, if you want to create a video, I mean, automotive dealerships might have that because, you know, they have a bigger budget, but, but for a small plumber, is it realistic that they create a video? And should they have someone create display creative? Because obviously when you use PMAX, it goes into the display side as well.
[00:29:31] Navah Hopkins: So Google will let you crawl your site and pull images and pull things from your site, and they will create an average video for you. It's honestly not very good, but they will create an average video for you if you want. The more exciting news is actually the stock photos and kind of the stock pieces where you can do.
Like almost a video from a standing image. They were demoing some of that functionality at Google Marketing Live. The more AI is brand acceptable to you, the easier time you will have. The more you have to have a human create it, the more likely it is that yes, you need to go have a human create it, you need to have the approval, you need to have the budget for it, so on and so forth.
But you don't need to have a super fancy ad. So unless you're going for one of the Netflix placements or the Amazon Prime placements, it doesn't need to be fancy. It just needs to get the message across in the first five seconds in case people skip. Then you have 15, 20 seconds to be as creative and lovely as you want.
And then if you're going even longer than that, have fun. But the most important thing is that you get comfortable saying the most important things in five seconds, your name, how to contact you. That's it. That's all you have to get out in those first five seconds.
[00:30:47] Steffen Horst: Perfect. Now, unfortunately we, we come to the end of today's podcast episode, just to kind of summarize what we talked about.
So Pmax, you got to give a little control to kind of to gain a little bit. But you should look at having at least 50 conversions in order for the system also to work properly. If you can't get that for your primary conversions, look for secondary conversions, something that is not kind of the form for the call, basically.
Anything else to mention as, as kind of a point?
[00:31:20] Navah Hopkins: Honestly, you know your business best. I can sit here and give you advice on PMAX and how to make it work, but ultimately, if you have tried it and you know it's not going to work for you, don't waste your time. However, this is a big however, there are rules of engagement that are important to understand.
So if you didn't factor in the 50 plus minimum conversions, that's a reason to reconsider PMAX. And if you didn't factor in the video and make sure that you had the video when you ran it. That's another reason to reconsider PMAX, but again, there is no one who knows your business better than you. And no guru, no thought leader, no anybody should ever push you into spending your marketing dollars in a way that you don't feel comfortable and that you don't understand because ultimately you know your business best.
[00:32:12] Steffen Horst: Well, Nara, thank you so much for joining me on the Progressive Ad Podcast and sharing your knowledge on Google search, particularly PMAX. If people want to find out more about you, about Optimizer, how can they get in touch?
[00:32:24] Navah Hopkins: Well, you can always hit me up on LinkedIn. I love sharing things. I try to do a post today.
I'm also the Ask the PPC for Search Engine Journal. I also contribute to Search Engine Land. You can always check out PPC Town Hall for Optimizer. We do those on Wednesdays. And also I'll give a shout out to PPC Chat, which is every Tuesday. I'm usually pretty active there. And the women in tech SEO group were also contribute there.
So those are Slack groups and Facebook groups. So if you are interested, I will happily share those, those bits of information.
[00:32:58] Steffen Horst: Wonderful. We'll leave all that information in the show notes. Thanks everyone for listening. Please join us again next week when we will discuss how small businesses must approach advertising to be successful, which channels they have at their disposal, and which pitfalls to avoid.
If you like the performance news about podcasts, please subscribe and leave us a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast application. To find out more about Symphonic Digital, visit us at symphonicdigital. com or follow us on X. at Symphonic HQ. Thanks again and see you next time. Performance Delivered is sponsored by Symphonic Digital. Discover audience focused and data driven digital marketing solutions for small and medium businesses at SymphonicDigital. com.
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