Today in Digital Marketing - Performance Max Goes Negative

Episode Date: February 18, 2025

This week, our Google Ads correspondent Jyll Saskin-Gales is here to discuss the introduction of negative keywords in Performance Max campaigns, the new DemandGen campaign type, and the ability to exclude demographics in PMAX..📰 Get our free daily newsletter🌍 Follow us on social media or contact us📈 Advertising: Reach Thousands of Marketing Decision-Makers.GO PREMIUM!Get these exclusive benefits when you upgrade:✅ Listen ad-free✅ Back catalog of 20+ marketing science interviews✅ Get the show earlier than the free version✅ Member-only monthly livestreams with TodAnd a lot more! Check it out: todayindigital.com/premium✨ Premium tools: Update Credit Card • Cancel.MORE🆘 Need help with your social media? Check us out: engageQ digital🌟 Rate and Review Us🤝 Our Slack.UPGRADE YOUR SKILLSGoogle Ads for Beginners with Jyll Saskin GalesInside Google Ads: Advanced with Jyll Saskin GalesFoxwell Slack Group and Courses.Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital on the traditional territories of the Snuneymuxw First Nation on Vancouver Island, Canada. Associate producer: Steph Gunn.Some links in these show notes may provide affiliate revenue to us.Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected, be Zen. Hey, it's Todd. Just before we get started, I wanted to mention that we had a glitch at our end with Jill's microphone in the production of the show. So she sounds a little wobbly at some times. Don't worry, she wasn't on mushrooms or anything. It was a technical problem at our end. She still should be understandable. All right, here's the show. It is Tuesday and time for our weekly deep dive.

Google Ads, of course, receiving dozens of updates over the last month, so it's kind of hard sometimes to sort out which ones are actually meaningful and which ones are just noise. Lucky for us, our Google Ads correspondent Jill Saskengales is here. Jill worked at Google for six years. She's now host of the Inside Google Ads course and podcast, a highly sought-after Google Ads coach. Hello, a highly sought after Google Ads coach. Hello, Jill. Hello, Todd.

So lots in the last couple of weeks even, hey, in Google Ads? Google's been busy. Jenny Marvin's been busy. Jenny Marvin is the liaison person. So she's the most visible sort of out there on social media. Now, the one that I want to sort of talk about first is I see that negative keywords and performance max have changed. What is the change and what does this mean? This is something advertisers have been asking for for years. So coming soon, you'll be able to add negative

keywords to performance max. Now, this is both news and not news. So previously, you could add negative keywords at the account level to your entire Google Ads account, and those would apply to PMAX. Or if you worked with a Google rep, you could ask your Google rep to apply negative keywords for you to your PMAX campaign. What's new now is you can add your own negative keywords to your Performance max campaigns. However, you can only have up to 100 negative keywords per campaign, which sounds like a lot, but it's not uncommon for folks to have thousands of negative keywords

on search campaigns. So while it's a big win that you can now have 100 negatives on your own, I know there are some in the industry left wanting more. But personally, I think this is good. Like if you need more than 100 negative keywords, maybe just don't run PMAX in the first place, you know. Are there a lot of advertisers that have tons and tons at the account level where it's always been and then they probably

only need a handful at the campaign level? People don't tend to use the account level as much. I think they should. The problem, of course, is there might be some things that you still want to advertise on search, but not on performance max or on one campaign, but not the other, whether it's different service lines or brand versus non-brand. So there are things you just don't want to advertise on. Account level negatives is the way to do it. If you want to keep your PMACs off of your brand, there's a feature called brand exclusions that helps you do that. You don't need to use negative keywords for that. And so in addition, you can have up need to use negative keywords for that. And so in addition, you can have up to 100 now negative keywords, which you can implement yourself on

your PMAX campaigns. And that's rolling out to accounts now. It's kind of surprising, isn't it? Like, I mean, Google, especially with Performance Max, and to be fair, the other platforms, automated versions of this are known for having like almost no control over it. And people have been asking for negative keywords in campaigns and a bunch of other stuff for a while. Why do you think they're adding this? Doesn't it kind of go counter to the just let the AI black box decide everything we know best? Yeah, it absolutely does. And unpopular opinion, I think it's a mistake that Google's doing this.

I mean, I think Google has to to get PMAX adoption up. Google wants everyone using PMAX. And this is prediction, not like statement of fact. Google wants everyone using PMAX so they can slowly deprecate everything else. And that's all we'll be left with. But I do think it's a mistake. You know, the way to get PMAX to work is not flying negative keywords and trying to like force it into submission. It's using your conversion tracking and your bid strategy and your creative to guide it in the right direction, like leading from the front with a carrot, whereas negative keywords are like a stick.

So I'm surprised that Google did this. I mean, sure, I guess it's a good thing, helpful, but also it's only 100 negative keywords. You could eat through those pretty quickly. In your experience when you're sort of dealing with clients that you consult with, how are people misusing negative keywords the most? What's the biggest mistake people make with negative keywords in Google Ads? Not understanding negative keyword match types.

Because negative keywords have match types, broad phrase exact, just like regular keywords do. But their definitions are different in terms of how they work. Yeah. So if you've never looked up the negative keywords article on the Google Ads Help Center, I will leave it there. Check it out. A broad match negative keyword and a phrase match negative keyword, like not the same as a regular broad match keyword or a regular phrase match keyword. And do most advertisers like the majority that I don't know, they sell something small,

they have a they have like, you know, a small, medium sized business. Should they be using negative keywords at the campaign level because Google has put it in? Or should we continue to just kind of go, let's trust the system? Ooh, well, I'm going to respond to that with an it depends, but not just back out on it depends. It depends because the reason PMAX doesn't work for a lot of smaller businesses isn't a PMAX problem. It's a business problem. It's like you don't have accurate conversion tracking in place. You don't have sufficient budget to get PMAX to work. You can't afford or don't have accurate conversion tracking in place. You don't have sufficient budget to get PMax to work.

You can't afford or don't have the skills to do frequent creative testing. And so PMax doesn't work. And so negative keywords could be helpful to try to get it to work. But that's all what I come back to. Like if you give the machine the inputs it needs to succeed, then it will succeed. If you don't give it the inputs it needs to succeed, then you can stick. If you don't give it the inputs it needs to succeed, then you can stick on band-aids, like negative keywords. But ultimately, I still don't think that's the solution to getting better results. Either run PMAX properly or don't run

PMAX. There's still, what, six, seven other campaign types to choose from. It all comes down to creative, doesn't it? It really does. And that's where, you know, meta ads, Google ads becoming more and more alike, more signals, less targeting, and the creative is more important than ever. And meta ads practitioners are way ahead of us. They're used to creative being all important. As Google ads practitioners, we're just used to typing in some text and printing money. And sadly, those days are gone. So it's definitely a skill we're all trying to work on. Definitely. All right. So Performance Max, one campaign type in Google Ads. Demand Gen is another one. Can you first tell us sort of a recap? What is Demand Gen? What are those campaigns? And what is the change that you've seen in the last little while? Demand Gen is actually the newest campaign type in Google Ads.

And the best way to think about it is meta ads on Google. And that's because this campaign type was designed to steal ad dollars from meta. So it has audience targeting. It only serves on Google owned properties. That means YouTube, Discover and Gmail. It's image and video based. It's the only place in Google ads you can have carousel ads. It's the only place you can use lookalike audiences. Those will both sound familiar if you use meta. Really powerful campaign type. I see great results across industries with demand gen. And so this recent change, again, something, I don't know why Google is doing this, but

I'm probably the only person who's unhappy about it, is you'll be able to now choose your inventory. So previously, with the demand gen campaign, when you launched it, you would run ads across Gmail, Discover and YouTube, including YouTube Shorts. And you couldn't choose what goes where. Google would figure out the inventory for you. But now you're going to be able to choose your inventory in DemandGen. So if you want to run only Gmail or only YouTube Shorts, you can do that. Highly unusual, but exciting for people. Some people

say, you know what? I want to run DemandGen, but I don't want to be on Gmail because I'm worried if someone has opted out of my email marketing list, but then they get served a DemandGen ad, I could be in trouble. So like, okay, you can opt out of Gmail inventory now. Or if you just want to advertise on YouTube Shorts on a conversion objective, there's no more conversion-focused video campaigns. The only way to run that is in YouTube, and maybe you just want to be on Shorts, right? So you can do that now. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses,

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Visit K-I-N-S-T-A dot com to get this limited time offer for new customers on select plans. Don't miss out. Get started for free today. It's strange because you can understand the other direction how it benefits Google, which is to force us, the old version, force us into all of it. They have excess inventory. They can still sell it. I'm not clear why Google did this. Like, Jill, surely the answer to why Google did this cannot possibly be because it helps marketers.

They've never made a decision based on that truly. There's always been some real business benefit to Google behind it. What does Google get out of this? More people using Dimension. I think it's the same thing they're doing with PMAX. I think they have to. Again, as someone who, you know, has been working with Google for a decade, like this move does not make sense. You know, we as marketers like to think we're all knowing, but you know what? AI is really good at this stuff, too. When working together, we can do great things. And our own biases about the kinds of inventory to work, the kinds of keyword placements that work can often be proven wrong if given a chance to be proven wrong. And a big budget. And a big budget. A big budget always

helps. So I, you know, Google is doing this to get adoption up. They need more people using these products. It's the only business reason I could think of why they would do that. Because it's not just to generate the goodwill, you know, it's not just to generate marketer goodwill. Yeah, it's not like they've got a feature list that we're all upvoting, you know, here's what we want you to do next. And then they just sort of do it like a small developer on an iPhone app would do or something like that. No, definitely not. But there's actually other development that I think is really interesting. Again, so unexpected and I think has gone underreported. It's also about PMAX and it has to do with demographic exclusions. Bear with me. So in Google ads or any ad platform, demographics is when you target based on age or gender, right? You want to target 18 to 24, or we only want to target female, whatever it might be. You can't use demographics in a shopping campaign. I don't know why it's never been an option. If you run search, you can do it, display, every other campaign type. You can choose your demographics. With shopping, you never could.

And in PMAX, you never could because PMAX is all about signals, not targeting. But now there's been a change where in PMAX, for the first time, you can do demographic exclusions. So let's say, you don't want to target people over a certain age or you don't want to target one gender or the other. You can actually do that in PMAX now. And Google has said it's going to actually influence the shopping inventory as well. So now for the first time, not only can you choose specific demographics in Performance Max, that's also going to allow you to choose specific demographics for shopping. So this is really exciting if you're like a women's clothing store. You know, you were never able to exclude men before, And now you can in shopping and in PMAX. So I think that's really cool and deserves more attention. It makes sense, honestly.

Like, I mean, relying on AI to do that is, you know, I mean, sure, I guess it probably gets it right most of the time. But why not just say, look, no men? Look, you know, this is an ad for PMDD. We don't, men do not need to deal with this. Can I ask you something? I'm sort of hesitant a bit to wade into this just because of the nature of the topic. But, and you and I are both Canadian.

We are both in Canada. So we do not have a dog in the race of happenings down south. But there has been a shift in terms of the definition of certain demographic categories. Can you tell me, did Google ads ever have like a third gender? I'm thinking like male, female. Was there a trans category? Was there an other category? Unknown. So there's male, female and unknown. And unknown, because remember with Google, when you create a Google profile, like when you create a Gmail account is how we usually do it. You do say your year you were born.

You could lie, but you do that. But you never state a gender. So gender is inferred from the first place. And fun fact, I actually looked up my work profile. Google thinks I'm a man. My personal profile says I'm a woman. Does it tell you based on what? The Google Pro with Jill.ca.

It says gender, male. Go figure. Wow. And it doesn't give you any kind of like, here's the data we used. Like sometimes it'll show you like, here are the ads you've shown interest in. Yeah, it has all that. But it doesn't say why it thinks I'm male. But were they all like trucks and guns?

I'm Canadian. No. That's an aside. But there is unknown as well. And so unknown could be because Google can't determine the gender or because Google doesn't have enough information if it's like not a signed in user. So in like a display campaign, you could have a lot of traffic coming from unknown. Whereas in a demand gen campaign, we are only serving on Google owned inventory, which means it's almost all signed-in users, you'll probably have very few unknown. I will say, where did I just see it? Spotify Analytics for my podcast. There were more gender options there in the demographics. And that's the first time I've ever seen it in a marketing tool.

In Google Ads and Google Analytics, it's just male, female, unknown. Yeah. Well, interesting to watch those to see what sort of what evolves there. Hey, have you seen this Google ad scam going around? Todd. Oh, that's a yes. Yeah. I mean, look, there's always scams. There's always scammers. This one is hitting very sophisticated people. Can I tell your listeners a bit about it? Yeah, yeah, please.

So there's this very intelligent Google ad scam going around where the scammers are running at Google Ads, Google search ads to look like it's the Google Ads login page. So if you just Google Google Ads and you see the top sponsor results, it'll say, you know, run ads on Google now. It looks legit. The way they're doing this, I've heard, is they're using Google Sites somehow. So the domain is still Google. Oh, that's smart. Yeah. OK. Right. And you click on it. It looks like the legit Google ads login page. You log in, type in your credentials and boom, they have access to your account, all your Google payments info, which they can then use to rack up a lot of bills. But wait, that assumes you don't have two factor authentication, right?

Or are they getting around that? That I'm not sure. I guess. Because there is a way to get around them and i have felt i have fallen guilty to this myself a couple years ago on the facebook side is it sent me some i don't know your i think it was one of those like you've got some copyright issue and your page is gonna be banned yes yes so i clicked and i went to a page you know login page and like an idiot i gave it my username and password and it said, what's your two-factor authentication code?

So I looked it up in Authenticator and I gave it to them. And I think there was someone sitting there, really, waiting for that six-digit number to come and getting it and immediately putting it into my account before that one expired. So we don't know if they're doing that on this Google AdSense. I'm not sure if that's part of it. But this is not some janky thing. Like, apparently, it looks very real. I know multiple agencies, business owners, you know, who it's not their first rodeo who have fallen for this. And it's really bad. So my advice for you, if you want to log into Google ads, just type ads.google.com into your browser. It is not much longer than going to Google and typing Google Ads.

It's just ads.google.com so that you know you're on the real login page to go to your Google Ads. And don't let it autocomplete because someone may have put something up in your web browser, a pop-up or something. I've seen this as well where they register a URL that looks very, very similar, like googlei.com or something like that. Not intending for you necessarily to go at that moment, but just having it in your browser history. So when you start to type ads.google, you'll see one autocomplete and you hit it

and it might take you to the wrong one. So type in, the way that I tell people to get around. Just have it bookmarked. Or have a bookmark. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense.

All right. Thanks, Jill. Thank you. Jill Sassengales is our Google Ads correspondent. You can learn more about her Google Ads training program at our affiliate link at todayindigital.com slash GA. Jill is here every month on the Tuesday show and you can watch our full unedited interview. There's a link to it in today's newsletter, which you can sign up to for free by tapping Thank you.