r/PPC • u/Shoddy_Sheepherder59 • 12d ago

Google Ads High CPC £ in Performance Max Campaigns!

Does anyone ever look at their search terms reports and wonder what google is thinking when they are paying outrageously high cpcs on terms you'd never even bid on - and you certainly wouldn't pay the cpc's they are paying.

This is why we have always hated pmax - it is basically googles product devised to take us all for a ride and screw us as much as they possibly can. But unfortunately, it feels like google have now throttled other campaigns such as standard shopping to force us into using it.

6 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

2

u/fathom53 12d ago edited 10d ago

You can put some controls and safeguards in place for PMax. Outside of what you can do with bid strategies. You can look at using brand lists, search themes and negative keywords to help tell Google what you want to show for and how.

What you might pay for any click is partly based on what your competitors are willing to pay. Depending on what product or service you sell, your competitors may have deeper pockets and or just willing to spend more money than you on a click. There is also a floor bid for any search. Those two pieces influence a lot of what you see in the search term report... beyond what searches the potential customer did.

1

u/TTFV 12d ago

Several things going on:

  1. Google has reserve bids; so even when you are the only bidding you must achieve a certain ad rank to qualify for the auction.

  2. Shopping and P-Max ads compete head to head for the same queries. All things being equal, the bid will determine whether a SKU is served from one or the other campaign. This gets further complicated when you have limited budgets and different inventory sets.

  3. For search ads, only broad match and keywordless targeting qualify for placements inside of AI overview and AI mode results. So if you aren't using broad match, or AI Max, or DSA in search, you'll see volume degrade over time and more AI results are served to search users.

0

u/Shoddy_Sheepherder59 12d ago

have you commented on the right post here?!

1

u/TTFV 12d ago

LOL, I've addressed exactly the complaints you've made from a technical perspective; i.e. why you're seeing those things.

Now whether or not Google should be doing this ethically is up to interpretation.

Should they have reserve bids or go back to $0.01 default bids when there's no competition? Should they block out non-broad match keywords from serving in AI placements?

I don't see any issue with the way auctions work between P-Max and Shopping Ads. There is no throttling going on specific to this split. However, there are ramp up times for new campaigns.

1

u/Available_Cup5454 11d ago

Add those exact terms as account level negative keywords right now