In this week's podcast, Trevor talks to John Horn from The Stub Group about how to Maximise your Google ads performance. Google has been increasing the automation of its ads programmes, recently introducing the highly automated Performance Max format.

Performance Max campaigns use machine learning to try and achieve a retailer's goals. They are highly automated and do not require the advertiser to specify any targets. To create a PM campaign, a retailer must specify

Google takes this info and finds customers for your business within your target.

PM campaign is a massive time saver; in John's experience, they outperform standard shopping campaigns.

In my experience (Trevor), whilst it is possible to beat automation in the short term, in the long term, performance is steadier.

The data you submit to PM is your biggest lever when optimising performance. Areas to optimise:

Creating attractive and relevant ad assets will help Google understand your products and promote them more effectively to potential customers.

With privacy becoming a more significant issue online, companies like Apple have stopped shaving customer data with advertisers. To help Google learn faster, submit audience data to Google, e.g. customer emails.

In my experience (Trevor), adding audience data makes a massive difference to performance.

Carefully choose your performance target. The most aggressive a target, the harder Google will find it to find customers at that price.

Joihn talked to Trevor Ginn from vendlab.com, an eCommerce agency specialising in online marketplaces and e-commerce sales platforms.