Uncovering Hidden Data in Google Ads with Floris van Vleuten

Andy Splichal:

Welcome back to the Make Each Click Count podcast where we dive deep into strategies for scaling e commerce brands through powerful digital marketing techniques. Today, I'm joined by Floris van Vleuten, a true Google Ads expert and founder of amplifies marketing.com florist has just launched a brand new masterclass in Make Each Click Count called Revealing Secret Data from Google PMAX Ads, where he's breaking down hidden insights for maximizing Google Performance Max campaigns. Now, if you've ever felt like Google Performance Max is more of a black box and a transparency tool, well, you're not alone. But Floris's Masterclass is designed to lift that veil, helping advertisers optimize budgets, track hidden data and ultimately boost their returns. Welcome to the show, Floris.

Floris van Vleuten:

Thank you so much, Andy. It's, it's good to be here. We are a bit with a, with a time difference, but that shouldn't be any problem. I'm, I'm all fired up and I'm excited to have this conversation with you today.

Andy Splichal:

Great. And I think listeners will be too because PMAX is pretty prevalent. Most people are using it, but you're really just leaving it to, to Google to where you're going to serve it now. And there's never really been a lot of stuff you can see on it. So I mean, what you've shown in this masterclass is great, I guess. What's the story behind your journey before we jump into it? And how did your path inspire you to create this masterclass revealing secret data from Google PMAX Ads?

Floris van Vleuten:

Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. So I got in digital marketing in general in 2019 and I landed my first couple clients as a freelancer in 2020. After I followed some courses and after being in like digital marketing in general in like two years, I decided to double down on Google Ads because I found that within Google Ads only there was enough, like, enough to learn to basically cover up my entire work week. Right. Worth of things to figure out for clients and everything. So I decided to drop all the other services and go full on into Google Ads and also for E commerce businesses specifically because I like working with E commerce brands and I am generally getting the best results for the E commerce brands. So then I decided to double down on that and since about two years I've been building an agency around it because my own week was full of clients and I decided to help other brands as well, more brands. So we're now building a team.

Floris van Vleuten:

We're with three to four people and helping brands around the globe scale with E Commerce, scale their brand with Google Ads. Well, that's great. Now the thing. Yeah, go ahead. The thing is Performance Max is a used campaign type of pretty much all of the Google Ads accounts, especially for E commerce. And you can set a bidding strategy that's called Target roas and it can be very helpful to get you the conversions that you want. But Performance Max is also very good at getting easy conversions. So and it, it doesn't give you, give you the, the best data insights, I would say.

Floris van Vleuten:

And I created this master class in the make each Click Count University and I don't deserve all the credit because I didn't figure out how to do this. So the, the, the script that we use in a masterclass is called the Mike R. Performance Max Insight Script. So Mike Rhodes figured this out and what the Google Ads expert actually did was he checked all the data points that Google has on us but doesn't give us and then created a script on the base of all the data that we can attract from the account and then put that in a spreadsheet template so you can apply it to any accounts of yourself and then reveal data that Google isn't showing you actually.

Andy Splichal:

So what time. I mean, for people who, I mean, if you're listening to this and you're intrigued by this, you're probably running Google Ads or Google PMAX campaigns. What data are you going to be able to see when you apply this Mike Roads script to your account?

Floris van Vleuten:

Yeah, I believe the spreadsheet that comes with it has like 12 sheets on the top of my head. The most important things that you will get data on are your assets, the placements. You're getting a search term report and you're also getting a very good and useful report where it shows the profitability of your products.

Andy Splichal:

And when you get that information, what do you do with it and do you go over that in the masterclass?

Floris van Vleuten:

We do cover that in the masterclass. Yeah. So the thing is it's really based upon the data that you see in the spreadsheet. Right. And because it's so complicated, there's not one thing that you do in one scenario because one scenario has like 10 or 15 parameters. So I guess as an expert you just have to, or, or like as a marketeer of your own E commerce brand, you just have to check the data, see all the valuable data points like search terms like placements, like asset performance, and then make your choices based on the data that you see. Yeah.

Andy Splichal:

Now performance max, what do you do if you see, you know, you're not showing up, you're, you're spending a lot of money, let's say in the search or the display network, outside the shopping network or, or you're showing up for terms you don't want to show up for.

Floris van Vleuten:

Yeah. So there are basically three types of performance max campaigns that you can run. One is full build, which is what Google wants, right. You deliver every, every piece of asset like headlines, descriptions, videos, your feedback, everything. That's a performance max full build. And then Google can just choose when to show your ad. Another option is to not attach a feed. So then you're basically creating a performance max campaign without a feed which can show up at all placements except the shopping placement.

Floris van Vleuten:

And you can also create one campaign which is the third type, which is performance max with just the feed and no headlines, no descriptions whatsoever. And then you're basically creating a shopping campaign on steroids. That's what we call it. So those are the three types and based on your placement performance, you can pick which campaign type which performance max campaign type works best for you. So for example, if you see a very well performing performance on the shopping placement, but just overspending on the display placement, you could restructure your performance max campaign into just shopping and then you'll be more profitable probably. Now when it comes to the search terms that you also see within the script, you can create a search term exclusion, but that's, that's like a different game because you can regularly not exclude the negative keywords. You cannot apply negative keywords towards your performance max campaign. So what you then have to do is create a performance max modification form which goes through Google support and they exclude either a list or certain keywords from your campaign.

Andy Splichal:

So I'm curious, how long have you been using this with your private clients?

Floris van Vleuten:

Since it out, I think a year or something.

Andy Splichal:

And what kind of improvement in results have you, have you seen using this Amazing.

Floris van Vleuten:

I mean like countless, countless. One very funny one is to mention mention is one account where we got a ROAS on the video placement of the Performance Max campaign on a high ticket E commerce store of 2.8x which was like highly profitable for this client but we didn't deliver any videos. So the 2.8x ROAS was from automatically generated videos within Performance Max which was insane to see. Yeah, it's super interesting. So then we communicated that with the client, they created an actual YouTube ad for it and now we implemented that into the account and the entire structure and now we're running a 4x on the video campaigns.

Andy Splichal:

Yeah, I mean that's great. And it's amazing that the PMAX has become so popular when it really gives advertisers no insight into where it's running or what it's running or anything like that.

Floris van Vleuten:

Yeah, I guess that's because of the performance because as I said at the introduction, Performance Max is a very powerful campaign type but it's just very powerful to get convert like easy conversions. So you must be aware that if you are running Performance Max campaigns, that's pretty likely that Performance Max was just spend your budget towards branded traffic and if you excluded the brand then it will just spend towards warm traffic people who already once visited your website and are searching non branded terms, for example. That means that the scalability of Performance Max campaigns is pretty low. You like there's, there's no way that you can scale just one Performance Max campaign in an account without any additional traffic sources. Right. So what you have to do in my opinion is to use Performance Max with a brand exclusion and then build all the other traffic sources around it and not just Google Ads, but also we, we advise our clients to run meta ads for example just to get them some colder traffic, warm them up on the website and then Performance Max does the conversion part.

Andy Splichal:

Yeah, this great suggestion. Now let's talk you and mention about budget allocation and scaling. I guess what insights from your course or your master class here could help with optimizing budgets across channels in pmax.

Floris van Vleuten:

So I briefly touched upon the placements performance. I think that's a pretty interesting one to see. And that's one data point data piece that Google doesn't give you because you won't see the video spent and the video roas for example or the search spent and the search roas or shopping or display or whatever. So based upon the data that you see in the spreadsheet, you can either eliminate that piece from your Performance Max campaign Or or expand your account on that specific placement to run extra remarketing campaigns, an extra DSA campaign, maybe extra shopping campaigns to fuel the performance max campaign. So it really depends on what kind of data you see. But in pretty much all client accounts that we use a script on, we see data to optimize on.

Andy Splichal:

Now for my private clients I'm always saying the feed is the foundation for your Google shopping campaigns and actually it's pretty cool. I've started using AI to build a customer avatar and then change the titles, product titles on that and seeing great results. What are some of your top tips outside maybe of the masterclass for keeping product feeds clean and effective?

Floris van Vleuten:

Yeah, that's a good point. That really depends on how many products you have. If you just have 10 SKUs, you can optimize those in Google Merchant center if you have a hundred or a thousand, I would recommend you to use a tool like Channable or whatever like a feed management tool. For feed management what we always do is we use the best image that we can find and that is 9 times out of 10 a lifestyle image because they stand out from the rest and like the easy white background just product image. Right? So we use lifestyle images if we can. We stuff the titles, the product titles with title case with keywords that are high intent and high volume and then we also throw in a couple usps for people who are like hovering over the products and then seeing the keywords of course, but then also the usps something that really makes them click and then besides that we just want what want to make Google it very easy to know what the product is. So besides title description and image optimization, we want to use all attributes that we can. Right? So if we are using a fashion item for example, we want to include material, color, size, like everything because we want to let Google know what we are selling and then Google Google decides when to show the product.

Andy Splichal:

I'm curious, you mentioned lifestyle images. Have you used the new AI image generator inside of Google Merchant center and what do you think of that?

Floris van Vleuten:

That's a good point. I haven't personally like I played around with it but for a B testing my team does it for the clients and I believe we had some pretty good results with it. But the authenticity of the lifestyle images that the client delivered were a bit better I would say. But we're close and I think if you don't have any lifestyle images you can easily create one if you just have the white background simple product image. So then it would be a very.

Andy Splichal:

Good solution so with all the accounts you've seen over the years, what are some of the common mistakes that you see E commerce advertisers make when it comes to Google Ads and particularly with performance max or Google Shopping?

Floris van Vleuten:

The biggest one is not excluding your brand name from performance max. Together with that is not splitting branded and non branded traffic within the account or splitting it and then not understanding keyword match types. So it doesn't really make sense in the campaign structure. What we see with a lot of client accounts that we are auditing, not managing, but auditing, is that the entire account is filled up with either just a couple campaigns where branded and non branded traffic are completely split, like mixed up, or they tried to split it up but made a mistake. And that is maybe even worse because then you have a big data discrepancy and you cannot make any data driven choices based on that. So branded and non branded traffic is one thing, another thing is not truly understanding how bidding strategies work. So we saw accounts for example, with very little conversions that are running on smart bidding strategies, but the account isn't that smart because the account doesn't have any conversions. So that's a big mistake as well.

Floris van Vleuten:

I would say to counter that, that second mistake, what you want to do is start off as manual as possible and then when you got like between 30 and 50 conversions in a month, then transition into smart bidding and then tame the smart bidding beast, if I can name it that way, by using those brand exclusions, placement exclusions, and just like steering the algorithm in the right direction.

Andy Splichal:

When it comes to segmenting your Google Ads account, you know, I see a lot of people just running a single performance max for everything and letting Google do everything. How much are you segmenting for your private clients with their performance max? In general.

Floris van Vleuten:

With performance max, it depends on the account. We do use this pretty, pretty well known labelizer strategy where we labelize products based on their performance. So we have pretty much either a shopping campaign that delivers all the conversions or a performance max feed only campaign that delivers all the conversions with all the products included. And then after a while, let's say depending on the budget, but between two and six weeks, we see the performance, we see the well performing products and we labelize all the products based based on the performance. And then what we do is we put all the well performing ones in one campaign and we put the least performing ones in another campaign and then we still have the base campaign and then you can play around with budget and bidding strategies based on that. So that's One thing now it becomes a bit more complicated when you have multiple categories, for example. So we work a lot with D2C brands. So like 9 times out of 10 it is one avatar or one category or one like bigger category as a whole.

Floris van Vleuten:

If you're working with a wholesaler or big retailer then it can be a bit more complicated because then you would have a lot products, a lot of like a lot more products that are performing pretty well with like five categories and then a lot of products that aren't performing well, maybe 10 categories and then you would really have to think about the campaign structure that you are utilizing. So yeah, it's pretty hard.

Andy Splichal:

Now what about how many products does it make sense to put into a performance max for a minimum? I mean you mentioned, you know, you have some, some really good sellers and you'll put them into their own PMAX campaign but you have us have to have a certain number.

Floris van Vleuten:

That's a very good question. I don't know if we even have one product stores running. Oh we have, we have one client running on performance max feed only with an additional fallback shopping campaign to fuel the performance max campaign. So I would say even one product is enough for performance max to work. Well. The only thing is that you have to fuel performance max when you are using just one product. Right. With other traffic sources, even from Google or from meta ads.

Andy Splichal:

You know, for small business thinking about getting into Google Ads, it could be daunting and this episode probably hasn't helped as we've been talking quite a bit of technical details.

Floris van Vleuten:

I'm sorry about that, Andy.

Andy Splichal:

No, no, that's all right. I guess my question is what advice would you give to somebody just starting out with their Google Ads and trying to manage their risk?

Floris van Vleuten:

Maybe it sounds a bit like contradictive, but I would say try to make it as simple as possible. Try to pick some keywords with high volume and high intent. Start with a search campaign or a standard shopping campaign that's like a good foundation in and of itself. And then don't listen to Google. Like don't listen to Google.

Andy Splichal:

That should be the number one rule right there.

Floris van Vleuten:

Yeah, yeah. Probably don't listen to the auto applying recommendations or Google support that's trying to help you with just wasting your budget. That's one thing. And then two, as I said earlier, try to tame the beast, which means use brand restrictions, use placement exclusions and things like that. I think the foundation with those two things is a pretty good start to get some conversions and then of course maybe even above everything else, make sure you track everything. So make sure your conversion tracking is working properly because you want to make data driven optimizations and without proper conversion tracking you can't.

Andy Splichal:

Yeah, no, that's great advice. Not listening to Google. I have a client who came to me who sells water jet cutting services which is, you know, you use this to cut different metals and such. And they were just taking all of Google's recommendations and when they came to me and I did an audit, Google had them bidding on water as a phrase match for their water. I mean it would spend their budget in within like you know, an hour every day and with words not, you know, nowhere related to water jet cutting. So yeah, that's a big warning. Don't just automatically assume that Google automatic recommendations are going to help you and then a lot of times they, they will hurt you if you don't know what you're doing.

Floris van Vleuten:

I, I sometimes try because we manage around 20 to 25 accounts now like actively and we get a lot of emails from Google support saying hey, we have some recommendations, let's jump on a call. And sometimes it's from teleperformance, sometimes it's from like the Google headquarters in Dublin. Sometimes I feel like jumping up on a call and just listening to what they have to say. But to this day I just had one good Google Ad support person who I'm still in touch with by the way because he was actually good. But besides that one person, I think I had like 50 or 60 of the worst time wasters.

Andy Splichal:

Yeah, yeah, no, that's definitely something to think about when you're just starting out now besides your master class. And I mean there's a ton of great information for somebody who's running their campaigns. But if somebody needs help running their campaigns, who's listening out there? Who is the perfect fit for your agency and how can they get a hold of you?

Floris van Vleuten:

Okay, so the perfect fit for our agency is an E Commerce brand. We mostly work with D2C E commerce brands. Doesn't really matter where you are based but you have to have some kind of proof of concept. We can't build that for you because then we might not know if Google Ads is the right platform to test it out for you. Right. And with proof of concept, I mean that you know that people are either actively searching for your product, your product is good, your pricing is right, you already sold some items, maybe you're doing between 20 and 30k a month or higher obviously. But with the proof of concept we can easily build it up with Google Ads and how they can find me. They can either search for my name on LinkedIn, that's, that's like my main channel for communication, or they go can go to our website, which is amplifies-marketing.com.

Andy Splichal:

Right. And do you guys do any Amazon ads as well or are you mostly or all doing people selling on their own website?

Floris van Vleuten:

Yeah, no, we do just Google Ads and just for e commerce companies.

Andy Splichal:

Got it. Okay, cool. Well, this has been great. I always personally, this is one of my favorite subjects is Google Ads, what I've written the books on. And I always like to talk to somebody about it. So this has been a lot of fun for me. Flores, is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap it up today?

Floris van Vleuten:

No, I would, I would probably advise everyone just to keep up with the trend of Google Ads because things are changing quite fast. There's one trend that you probably want to look at, which is YouTube shorts ads. Maybe I can do a, do a class about that as well in the future. But we're very successfully running YouTube shorts ads for our clients now within demand generation, which is the new campaign type within Google. And I think that's going to become more powerful in 2025, so that's something to look out for.

Andy Splichal:

Yeah, no, that'd be great. I mean it's always good to keep ahead of your competition with knowing what's coming next. So that'd be great. Oh, well, thank you for joining us today, Flores.

Floris van Vleuten:

Yeah, thanks for having me, Andy, and enjoy your day for listeners.

Andy Splichal:

Remember, if you like this episode, please go to Apple Podcasts. Leave us an honest review and if you're looking for more information regarding connecting with Flores or amplifys-marketeting.com, you'll find the links in the show notes below. In addition, if you're looking for more information on his new masterclass revealing secret data from Google PMAX ads, you can access this masterclass and all other masterclasses for free for seven days. And after your free seven day trial, keep access to everything inside. Make each account university for just $19 a month. Well, that's it for today. Remember to stay safe, keep healthy and happy marketing and I'll talk to you in the next episode.