Hi folks,

Got another PMax A*% kicking hot off the presses for you today!

We tested another client using our GS+ algorithm versus PMax.

To analyze results, we applied scripts to enhance the visibility from a black box PMax campaign into a breakdown of brand, non-brand and display advertising, so that we could properly compare incrementality to our GS+ campaign.

We ran our shopping algorithm for 23 days (measurement source is Google Ads): And then, PMax.

But that is just looking at campaign level reporting. And since PMax campaigns use not just shopping, but display and search as well, we need to look at how the overall platform reporting looks:

You may be saying +28% in profit is good, but that’s not an A*% kicking…

Here’s. What. Matters.

Brand ads aren’t fully incremental. 

If you turn off brand ads entirely, you’ll typically only lose ~40% of the sales they were measured as driving (of course it varies by brand, but we’ve done a ton of tests and this is a reasonable average).

Non-brand ads are highly incremental, they drive mostly new visitors to your site.  Often, testing finds them to be ~90% incremental.

Display ads in this case weren’t material but we’ll say they are ~50% incremental.

Let’s factor incrementality, since it yields a much more accurate measure of sales actually driven by a channel.

Our campaign:

Pmax campaign:

Our campaign drove incremental sales of $61.7k, while Pmax only drove $38.3k.

Take special note of the yellow highlighting.  On the inventory that matters most, the one that drives new visitors to our client’s site (non-brand ads), we destroyed Pmax with nearly 3X the sales and more than double the ROAS.

How does this impact scale and profit?

Let’s look at that profitability analysis with a measure of incremental sales:

61% higher sales, 79% higher profit on 16% higher spend. 

That’s an A*% Kicking!

Pmax hid all the client’s data and hijacked their control, and stole their incremental value.  We gave it all back.