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Artificial intelligence is increasingly being added to the functionality of information systems, and the world’s largest e-commerce platform Google Ads is no exception. Google’s artificial intelligence algorithms made their debut in the advertising account with the launch of a new type of advertising campaigns – Performance Max. What is the peculiarity of PMax, a new format of high-performance campaigns? How do artificial intelligence campaigns work? How to add keywords and negative keywords to PMax campaigns? Let’s consider these questions in the article of the ADV Advantage campaign blog.
PMax features
Smart Shopping Campaigns were automatically transferred to the Google Performance Max category in 2022. Smart campaigns like PMax use artificial intelligence to determine bids, ad placements, and other parameters. AI algorithms analyze account data and the state of the e-commerce market, so this type of campaign is best suited for those marketers who have reached a dead end with their creatives and are looking for an updated way to promote them.
Advantages of PMax campaigns:
- quick and easy setup;
- artificial intelligence management;
- saving time on launch;
- one ad campaign for all formats.
Disadvantages of PMax campaigns:
- inability to influence AI algorithms;
- lack of detailed data for analysis;
- unpredictable behavior of algorithms in case of sudden changes in the market;
- lack of transparency of search traffic.
Keywords and negative keywords for PMax in Google Ads
Since PMax campaigns are managed by artificial intelligence, the system itself determines keywords and placements for ad placement. That is, the Google robot itself analyzes user search queries and their relevance to the goals of the advertising campaign. This is how the self-learning process takes place, which takes a lot of time and requires a large amount of existing statistics in the account. Traditionally, search and product advertising campaigns use keywords in combination with negative keywords, but PMax, as an automated system, uses its own methods of finding relevant queries and does not offer marketers to choose a list of keywords. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of negative keywords: they help to exclude irrelevant user clicks from the list, thereby reducing overall advertising costs. Can I add negative keywords to my PMax campaign? The standard functionality of Max Performance campaign settings does not allow adding negative keywords, but there are exceptions and two ways to solve the problem.
Option #1 – send a request to Google support
Creating a Google support ticket to add negative keywords to your PMax campaign is not an easy way, but it is effective. Consider this. The key negative keywords will not be added directly to the selected campaign anyway.
To use Google support, you just need to select Contact US in your account and write a text with the following content:
“On behalf of Company Name, I authorize Google to make the following changes to my Account Number without further notice.
Please associate the following list of minus words List name with the following campaign PMax Campaign name”
Additionally, you can thank the support team for their work and wish them a good day, but Option #2 is much more effective and simple.
Option 2 – negative words at the account level
The result of the work of the support team in Option 1 will be the addition of negative words only at the account level, not at the level of a specific PMax campaign. It is much easier and faster to add negative keywords to an account on your own. You can do it in the Account settings section in the Negative words item. You can add negative words manually by clicking the “+” button or upload a list from a .csv document or Google Sheets. The result will be the addition of key negative keywords to the account level, i.e. they will work for all advertising campaigns available in your account.
Conclusions
It is impossible to imagine the success of advertising campaigns without the use of negative keywords. They allow you to further refine incoming search queries by filtering out irrelevant ones. Google, as part of its Max Performance campaigns, does not yet allow the inclusion of negative keywords for more efficient artificial intelligence, but there is a technique that allows you to partially circumvent this limitation.
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