It pains me to write this because I’d rather see a business succeed, especially something close to home for me like record and DJ stores. Sadly “The DJ Hookup” is shutting down but some of the marks from the founder were telling. If you want to be a savvier Google Ads Customer – this is what NOT to do.
Many businesses had a lift during Covid. I experienced that working at a meat purveyor that also had an ecommerce business. Music software & retailers also had a honeymoon with more hobbyists working from home. Artists and music venues took a big it from pandemic related closures.
DJ Mag reported that Fender Guitars had their best year ever in 2020, beginner DJ controller sales skyrocketed for Pioneer DJ, online course sales doubled for Point Blank, and software maker Native Instruments had 30% growth across their portfolio. – SOURCE.
But eventually the dust settles, I saw this at my former employer. A huge spike in sales March – April 2020, but even 2021 was well elevated over 2019.
Sadly for “The DJ HookUp,” they posted a Going Out of Business Update last Fall that has since been removed. It can be seen via the Internet Archive.
When you’re primarily an ecommerce business – statements like this are not a good look.
Despite our strong foundation, the business experienced a slide in revenues from July 2022 through 2023 when Google introduced its Performance Max Adwords algorithm. This hurt our ability to control traffic to our deep catalog of products."
Oof this is a rough one. For starters it’s been Google Ads not AdWords since 2018. Performance Max is a campaign type, where as algorithm more often refers to organic search or SEO. This comes across as someone not savvy at all with channels that drive business.
Even when running Performance Max out of the box, there are controls around which products are available for advertising. Sounds like the founder was in charge of this and when you conflate a Google Ads campaign type w/ what sounds like SEO speak, I’m not surprised of the situation.
Not the biggest fan of performance max however one can easily copy & paste a list of up to 1,000 best selling SKUs as targeting criteria. It sounds like their campaign manager was making rookie mistakes by serving the entire product catalog.
Here's why I'm not a fan of Google's Performance Max (PMax) Campaign
While it’s one campaign to rule them all, that convenience has consequences.
The main drawback is reporting. PMax can serve shopping, search, display & video ads and you can’t see important things like cost & revenue for each placement. 3rd party scripts are required.
It will do retargeting for you, but you can’t control overall spend, messaging and audiences.
It will serve on your brand name, we all know “Branded” terms are easy lay ups so this will favorably pad pmax revenue making easy sales and not spending more heavily on general or brand agnostic queries.
Standard shopping & feed only pmax campaigns with “brand exclusions” tend to have very high new customer rates (60%+), albeit at a lower ROAS but this is a good thing and how you truly scale.
Audience level reporting – you can add audiences to standard shopping campaigns and see line level performance. Audiences can be remarketing lists, customer lists, affinity & in market lists.
Search Term Reporting – Shopping is where the real money is for Pmax, search query data isn’t ideal in standard campaigns, & search term data is far less useful for PMax.