Performance Max for CMOs: how your Google PMax strategy can help drive growth  

By Daniel Ireland, Head of Paid Media, Launch

For many marketing leaders at scaling ecommerce brands, Google’s Performance Max has felt like a forced trust exercise.

You provide the budget and the assets while Google provides the conversions. But for a CMO under board-level pressure to deliver incremental growth, ‘trust the algorithm’ is like sitting in the backseat of a car with a brick on the accelerator. It will take you somewhere – but it’s a risk rather than a strategy.

At Launch, we are seeing a recurring pattern among brands hitting a performance plateau. To escape the black box of automated bidding, many have retreated to the safety of feed-only PMax or Standard Shopping.

This might protect ROAS in the short term, but it kills growth. You pick up the customers already looking for you in shopping feeds, but miss out on finding new ones.

Recent updates from Google suggest the tide is finally turning. We are moving beyond basic setup into an era of true scaling Performance Max – giving CMOs strategic control they’ve never had before. Here is how these changes allow us to grab hold of the steering wheel and move the algorithm toward the right customers.

Increased visibility on where your Pmax campaigns appear

The lack of transparency around where PMax ads will appear has always been frustrating for marketing directors. But now, Google is adding the option to break down placement reports by network. This provides much-needed clarity on where your brand shows up.

It’s a change which not only helps maintain brand safety, but also provides the commercial honesty needed to justify spend to a CFO. We no longer have to guess if budget is being wasted on junk display traffic. We can see it, measure it, and control it.

Boosting brand awareness with PMax

We know that scaling a brand requires more than just bottom-funnel tactics. But justifying budget for video and display within PMax has historically been difficult because the link to sales was opaque.

With the introduction of daily budget reporting, CMOs can clearly see the wider context of how awareness activity feeds the bottom line. We can finally measure the impact of manual video and display assets on driving conversions. This turns awareness from a vague concept into a measurable component of your connected performance.

Find out how to access your budget report here.

Scaling Performance Max: moving from safe plays to brand growth

If your growth has flatlined despite following Google best practice you may have fallen into a safe play trap. Relying on limited feeds is a sign that the strategy has hit a ceiling.

Google’s latest Performance Max updates provide the guardrails that CMOs and performance marketing leaders require to move back into a full-funnel approach with confidence.

They enable you to steer PMax toward net-new customers while excluding first-party lists. This effectively forces the algorithm to find the incremental growth your business needs to scale.

The black box is changing. The question is whether you have the strategic framework in place to take the wheel.

Performance Max tips

Hopefully my advice has you thinking a bit more strategically about Performance Max. If you or your team needs technical information on campaign setup, you might find our blog 9 Performance Max tips for optimised campaigns useful.

Can we help you move out of a performance plateau?

If your current PMax setup is safe but your growth has stalled, it is time for a different conversation.

Take our Seven Levers of Growth Diagnostic to identify exactly where your strategy is holding you back.

About the author

Danny has 10+ years experience helping brands drive growth from their performance marketing.  After a significant time working for Google, he joined Launch and heads up our Paid Media expertise.  He oversees the planning, build, and execution of client’s global paid strategies to help our clients reach their north star objectives.   

Connect with Danny on LinkedIn.