117 - A Marketing Experiment We’re Trying in 2026

Zac: Google swears Performance Max works best when paired with a search campaign. We're about to ignore that entirely. In 2026, we're running a P Max only experiment to see what really happens when you take the safety wheels off and let Google's AI figure things out on its own. Alright, we're we're we're starting an episode. This is gonna be a little different this week. Uh I'm joined by Riley Collins, digital specialist, digital marketing specialist at Anadus71 instead of Rich. Rich is in Europe, I think, um, probably enjoying his time. Uh, as you saw in the hook, we're doing something a little different with our format too. Uh, we're focusing on an experiment we're gonna run. We haven't ran this experiment yet. It's something we're gonna do in 2026, but Riley's here to help me talk about it and kind of explain what the experiment is. This was kind of his idea. So uh yeah, welcome, Riley. Hi, hi. Thank you for having me. Of course, of course. Uh so as I said, for those who don't know what a PMAX campaign is, we'll talk about that a little later. Um it's kind of like an automated AI, right, kind of thing where Google's like basically like running a campaign on its own.

Riley: Yeah, it really is a um Google has the wheel in terms of the campaign. You don't really have uh much control over it. They've given you incremental control over the past like year, I would say, but really when it first launched, you really didn't have much control over it. Um, it's really just an automated campaign um where it just does a ton of outreach on its own. And um you're just there in the passenger seat.

Zac: So Google take the wheel. All right. Um, so they recommend pairing it with a search campaign, and the reason that we're paying it without is because what can it do on its own, right? And we'll get more into that in the actual episode because right now I'm gonna share a cocktail. So, Riley, you're gonna have to let me know your thoughts on this. Uh, the cocktail is the Anna Banana. This was found on a Forbes list for cocktails for adventurous drinkers. All right. So this was like 16 different cocktails, and this one was the one that stood out the most for me. So there's a little bit of background on this drink. It was created by oh man, what is the name? Anna Maines. So Anna Banana, Anna Maines, and she is a brand ambassador for Monkey Shoulder, which I'm pretty sure is a whiskey, a banana whiskey, that I've personally had. My brother had a bottle and I tried it and I loved it. But this was born from those silly what cocktail are you quizzes. The ones that are supposed to define your entire personality using three questions and a Zoe hex sign. So she was having a little bit of fun with uh creating a drink that she says is supposed to be uh kind of based on her personality that she would get on those cocktail quizzes. Pretty creative concept. Um, so this is dark, fruit forward sherry meets the bright, full fruit banana character of mucky shoulder, and then they also add creme de banana, which you know adds even more uh banana flavor. There's also honey and vanilla that smooth everything out, but uh this is one and three-quarters parts mucky shoulder, uh three-quarters of an ounce of sherry. There's a specific type of sherry that they recommend you use, but I'm gonna say anything that's uh fruit forward. Uh half an ounce of tempest food tempest, I mean it's a specific creme de banana, but I think any creme de banana will work, so I'm not even gonna try and say that word. And then a bar spoon of drambuy and lemon twist. And the directions are pretty simple. Stir, pour over large rock, express lemon over top of drink, drop twists into garnish. Uh so it basically wants you to stir everything together and pour over a large ice rock, probably into a rock's glass, if I had to guess, since they're asking you to put a large rock in. And uh, expressing the lemon peel, as Rich says, gets a lot of those oils out and kind of gives you more lemon flavor. That's why a lot of them rub the lemon twist around the rim of the glass, and then once you drop that in, it just makes the lemon really come out. And uh yeah, personally, I love banana drinks, so I think I'd love this. Curious to see what you think, Riley.

Riley: Honestly, if it tastes anything like a banana laffy taffy, I'm in for it. Um but when I heard Anna Banana, I kind of loosely thought of the Savannah bananas like baseball team. So I thought that I was curious if there was like any sort of tie-in with that. Unfortunately, there's not, but still funny enough.

Zac: They have their own uh banana cream soda and they sell it here. Oh, really? For those that don't know, I live in North Carolina, so I'm not that far from Georgia. But uh Chloe went out, who's my wife, went out and like found it and tried it, and she loved it. Also, I looked up monkey shoulder. I apologize for saying it's a banana whiskey, it's actually a scotch, and uh, you know me, I love scotch, that nice smoky flavor. It has hints of vanilla, orange. So it says monkey in your name, doesn't have banana. All the banana comes from the creme de banana, which I'm sure is a lot of banana. But uh yeah, it's probably a nice smoky cocktail. So awesome. All right, let's talk about some P Max campaigns, and we'll be right back after this little dance break. We are back. We just got done drinking our monkey shoulders. Uh, just kidding, it's like 9:30 a.m. for me. Oh no, it's like 10 a.m. for me right now, and probably even earlier for Riley. Time difference. So we're definitely not drinking any monkey shoulder. But what we are doing is talking about our P Max campaign experiment. So, Riley, uh the first thing I'm gonna talk about is why we're running this PMAX only experiment. I think uh we kind of talked about this before the episode when we learned that Rich was gonna be gone. We wanted to do something a little different, you know, uh try something new, see if it sticks. But we wanted to something that we're gonna be focusing on with our content in 2026 is running these kind of experiments to give you guys, our audience, a little bit of an inside look of some of the stuff that we try and things that we're looking out for and trying to stay on top of. Um, so yeah, I wanted to talk about why we're running this. That's a little bit of a why we're running marketing experiments, but why PMAX specifically?

Riley: Honestly, PMAX is kind of a mysterious campaign, at least it was in the very beginning. Um it's just something worth trying, I guess, for me. Um, I hear a lot of different stuff about PMAX that like you need a search campaign with it. Then I hear other stuff that's like, well, you don't really need a search campaign. I mean, some of our own client work, we've had a client portal that has a PMAX campaign running without a search campaign. And for those that know, uh PMAX campaigns work off of conversion data. So if you do have enough conversion data built up in your account, it is possible for it to run by itself. Um, but I don't know how much they had previously before running the PMAX. And it runs totally fine without having an active search campaign. So this is the biggest thing that kind of like sparked it for me was kind of like, do you actually need it? And does it matter like whether you're service oriented or if you're product oriented?

Zac: Right. And I knew that we talked about a client doing it by itself before, but I don't think that's enough of a use case to really come to a conclusion. And the more control, and obviously, like we're running that campaign for them, but doing it for us in a controlled environment is another uh is a is it gives us a deeper look, right? We're not necessarily we're able to test things, we're able to see how it runs with a search campaign, see how it runs without, and we're able to look at like the data that we give it. So um they say PMAX is a black box, which basically means you don't have control over it, right? And 100%. Kind of how you said in intro, they give you control, they're giving you us more and more control, but when it first came out, you didn't have control. How much do you think a search campaign actually matters in it? Do you think it if the PMAX campaign for our client is performing well by itself, do you think it could perform better with a search campaign? Or do you what do you think about that? Because I think that's one of the things this experiment is really going to take a look at is maybe you can run it without. And Google even says you can run it without, but it highly recommends you don't. So, I mean, how much of an impact does that search campaign actually have? And if running it by itself performs better than having it with a search campaign, that's a whole nother thing, right? And I think this is something that we're really trying to do in 2026, is think outside the box.

Riley: So yeah, definitely. I'm gonna pull it back a little bit. Um, we didn't really give like a huge, like clear define or a definition of like what a PMEX is. Just for like those who are aren't aware of like what an actual PMEX is, we like kind of touched on it in the beginning, but ultimately it's just an automatic, uh an automated campaign type that uses machine learning. Um and using that machine learning, it can optimize for conversions, um, spreading out to different um channels within Google. And it touches all of the different advertising channels. So that being search, display, YouTube, Gmail, and even maps. Um, and the way that kind of works is that instead of like when you're setting up a search campaign, you're setting up ads and you're setting up uh keywords that you're gonna use and all this different stuff. Um I mean, those are like the main two things. You have other stuff that you can throw into it, but those are the main two things on a search campaign. For a PMEX campaign, you create asset groups, which are just a huge group of pictures, videos, um, even headlines, all these different things that the campaign can take and then use to build its own ads inside these different channels. Um you can let it create its own campaign, or not campaign, but asset types within the campaign. We usually don't do that. That's a little bit, let's that's really letting it take the wheel and uh, you know, drive off the highway a little bit. Um, so at least we like to give it um we like to have some sort of control over it. Um, you know, establishing very clear, like these are the assets, you do not go beyond those assets.

Zac: Um is it like creating the assets like through like AI, or is it just like choosing like stock imagery?

Riley: It's like there, so it does stock imagery, um, but I think it does have some generative AI pieces, especially with like headlines and all that kind of stuff. Um, it tries to stay within the bounds of what you give it. It's almost like giving um an AI um, you know, 10 different headlines and you tell it to generate 10 more off the 10 that you gave it. So it's kind of rehashing what it's doing, but you still don't know what it's doing unless you really go in there and look at it. Um honestly, my recommendation is just turn that off, that automated stuff. Um that's not only in PMAX, they also do it for search and other campaign types where you can just let it automate for itself. Um, they really only want you to do that, so then it can just spend more money going off on its own tangent, but that's a different tangent for another episode. Um but kind of getting back into uh your question before, um does it need a search campaign?

Zac: Well, how much yeah, how much of an impact do you think it's going to have, right? Because it highly recommends it. And you kind of touched on this a little bit where it takes intent data right from your account already. But and if if we're running that account by itself, is it performing the best through its best of abilities? And we know it's doing good, but how much better could it do with search campaign? Or does it even matter, right? And that's kind of what we're trying to figure out in this experiment. I guess my main question is what do you think we're going to learn from taking search out? Or what do you think we're hoping to figure out by taking out of the equation?

Riley: I think the biggest thing is that PMEX campaigns run off of conversion data, whether that is like historical conversion data inside your um Google Ads account or conversion data that you're generating. So that being said, I think what we're gonna learn here is that service-oriented um campaigns, so like stuff that we do, we're providing a service with marketing. You're not gonna get a ton of natural conversions just based off of service, like you would a product, like if we're selling a t-shirt or anything like that. Um I think it's going to struggle more because it's based off that conversion data. If you can't generate enough conversions quick enough without that search campaign, because that's why they recommend you running a search campaign alongside it. The search campaign is there to generate those kind of base uh conversions so then it can um take that data and then outreach based off of what you're giving it. Um I think that's really what we're gonna learn is that like without the search campaign, service uh-oriented campaigns are going to hurt. Whereas like product, I feel like might generate enough conversions to where it can run itself on its own. Or at least that's my like explanation, seeing the other campaign from one of our clients um running without a search campaign. That's what I like to think. I like that it's journ it's creating enough um conversions that it can just kind of run itself. Um but I think that's the whole detriment is that if you don't run a search campaign next to it and you're not generating enough conversions, then will it really work? You know, that's the big question.

Zac: So and we're kind of still in the beginning stages of planning out how we're gonna do this experiment. So I would say if there's something that you in the audience want to see us try out with a PMAX campaign, we're definitely open to doing that. Uh I mean, it have to be before 2026. Uh so if you're listening to this in 2026 and you might want to check out the experiment like final product, we'll probably have a video or a blog or probably both. As I said earlier, we're still planning this. So there's probably gonna be some things that we're gonna try out. Like, as Riley touched on, like he thinks a product's gonna perform better than a service. While we're still working out exactly what account we want to use to run this, so there'd be different things we look at. I mean, we have access to product, a product, uh, an account that sells and advertises different products, and we also have you know our own account that we might test out with some of our B2B marketing like service-based content, like ads that we'll put out. So there's things we're gonna be looking at. None of this is exactly final, but this is an experiment where we are for sure going to run in 2026. But uh, you're getting in on the ground level, you're hearing what we're going what we're thinking about running this experiment. And hopefully it sparks some uh interest in like learning more about PMAX campaigns and also seeing how this experiment will turn out. So uh stay tuned for that update. But uh the second point we want to talk about is how we're gonna set this up, right? So some of the things we're thinking about when we're setting this up. So things like what assets, signals, and conversion goals we're giving this. So if you want to touch on that, Riley.

Riley: I think the biggest thing is controlling as many variables as you can. Um, it is at the very end of the day, it's not just a campaign. We're running an experiment to see how it works. Um so kind of our like foundational thoughts right now is we want to run a service-oriented campaign, we want to run a product-oriented campaign. We want to test the two because those are the two main ones that you're gonna have across no matter what business you're gonna have. Um so we have two um two ad uh types or like what we're advertising for. Well, yeah, we have two, we have two different um ad types. We also have two different um accounts that we're gonna run it in. That's the word I'm trying to look for. Um one that's product and one that's service. Um how we're gonna set it up. What I would like to do is we want to try the PMAX first. Because then you're not giving just by itself.

Zac: So we have the control of it.

Riley: Definitely. So you have control of the PMAX. You let the PMAX run because it's it it doesn't really make sense to run the search first because you're giving it the outlet to have the conversion data. We want to see how it runs without it. Like we're throwing it in the fire. We want to see like, can you can you make this work without the search campaign? You know?

Zac: And are we gonna give it are we gonna give it like assets in like stuff too? Or are we gonna like, are we just gonna be like, we're never gonna we're not gonna go crazy with the assets. I think that's too much. Because this is a real account, you know? Yes.

Riley: It is a real account.

Zac: I w I wonder what would happen though, if you can give it anything.

Riley: You do have to give it some sort of assets. And it is kind of like a search campaign where if you don't give it enough assets, you just get a low quality score. It will run, but it would like struggle to run against everything else. Okay. Um because it is like a live bid.

Zac: So we're gonna give it its best chance at performing on its own.

Riley: Yeah. Basically, the biggest thing to control the variables is that if one can't like if we have a video for one campaign type and we don't have a video for the other, or I should say, um for one channel. Like if we have a video for the product side and we don't have a video for the service side, we're not going to use video because one will have an advantage over the other. We want to have the exact amount of um assets and different assets types from each other. So maxing out the headlines, maxing out the images, like all of those different things. If we don't have a video for one, we don't have a video for both. Like we want to make sure they're on the same uh level of playing and all that kind of stuff, on the same field, I guess. Um, we don't want to give to, right? Exactly. Same budget across both. Um, basically leveling the playing field for both of them. Uh no campaign type is gonna have the advantage in the beginning, at least. Um, whatever can generate the fastest amount of conversions will then build up that advantage over time. But that's the that's the whole experiment. We're gonna see if it actually can do that, um, or if it will just struggle. Because one of the things that I've heard is that like if you don't give it a solid um conversion foundation kind of, you know, if you don't have a lot of uh conversions built up in the account, or you don't have something that's like building up the conversions, it will just kind of spiral itself. It won't know where to go because it doesn't have that data to then train itself on, right? So that's gonna be the biggest thing we can't really control for that. Um what conversion data is already in the account. We kind of just have to roll with it. Um so we're basically just controlling the actual campaign um and the actual asset types that are in there. You can't really control for what conversion data is in the account already, unfortunately. The only way that you would do that is if you started up a fresh new account. I don't know if we're gonna do that with this. Um we might, who knows? We might, who knows? I mean, it could be interesting because then you're starting completely fresh. There is no conversion data in there. Um, so that might be something worth looking at in the future as well. Like, does it even work with a fresh new account?

Zac: And all these variables that we're talking about won't be up in the air when we actually run the experiment, obviously. So we'll dive deeper into uh the reasoning behind everything when we actually do this experiment. Uh depending on how it goes, it might be a blog, it'll probably be a video no matter what, but it'll also be uh it could also be like a one sheet if it's like really in-depth and it does really well. Definitely we can kind of talk deeper about uh some of these variables. At the end of the day, I think kind of what I'm hearing is that we'll give it both campaigns their best shot of performing well, kind of how we would do for a client. Because at the end of the day, if this if a PMAX campaign can perform well in multiple instances, not just for one client, but also for this experiment that we're running, and we can figure out how it does perform well about stuff and how it can, so you don't have to run two campaigns. That might be something that you know we can help other those of you in the audience with. But if it performs better with a search campaign, then that's something we can go back to a client with and be like, hey, we probably should run a search campaign with this, even though that your campaign's doing well. There's a higher potential if you use the search campaign. So that's what we're gonna figure out. Um, PMAX is pretty new, so I think people need to be testing this stuff out, and we are going to be those people. So what give me your boldest prediction, Riley? What do you think P Max will do on its own? We've kind of seen some success with that client, but we don't know if we'll necessarily have the same conversion data that they'll have. So what do you think about it?

Riley: That's the biggest thing. Honestly, that's the biggest thing with the one client that we've mentioned. Um, there's a lot of different variables that like we aren't aware of or that we haven't considered. Like, do they have a strong like base, like conversion database and that kind of stuff? Um and if they do, like there you go. That's the reason. You know, it's just running off of that and it can generate more. I think honestly, my theory is that um because they're so dependent on conversion data, that we're gonna see product campaigns that can generate fast conversions succeed over like a service-oriented. So I think like if um whatever product campaign that we're gonna start to run, I think that one's probably gonna take the winner over this um the uh service-oriented campaign. Because I just think service-oriented campaigns like that B2B kind of situation, um you just don't generate enough leads or enough conversion data data fast enough to fuel a conversion or a PMAX campaign. So that's really what I think is gonna happen. I think the um product campaign is probably gonna take the win over it. Either way, I think it's it's gonna win, it's gonna win uh by itself with a PMAX. And then even when you introduce the search campaign to it, I still think that it's gonna have that lead that the service-oriented one won't be able to make up for in the end.

Zac: I'm wondering, so I'm wondering if Google just recommends that you do it with a search campaign. I mean, one, you need the data, but I'm wondering if it's just so that you run two campaigns. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Riley: Like, I mean, I'm kind of just wondering that I mean, there's a lot that you could say about Google that kind of backs up that theory because if you're running campaigns and you get like Google reps that want to contact you, everything that they try to tell you is really based around like spending more in there. Yes, if you spend more, you're most likely going to get more out of it. Yeah. But that really depends on your budget. Do you have the budget to spend more?

Zac: You don't necessarily need to run like they're trying at the end of the day, they're help a lot of them are helpful, right? But they're also trying to sell you on doing more within your account, right? Like you said. Yeah.

Riley: So I don't blame them. They're just a lot of the times they're just contracted to Google and Google's giving them like the talking points. So like it's not really their fault.

Zac: Um but and they want to help you with but also you need to know what works best for you. And honestly, we'll help you. We're we're here to help you figure this out, right? Like, we're going to be looking and we're kind we're kind of like mythbusters, right? Like, do you actually need a search campaign to be successful at PMAX? Are my gut's telling me no, because we've already done it for a client and they're doing pretty well. But I mean, just because we have one client that it's doing well for doesn't mean that'll do well for everyone, right? And this experiment's gonna look at the variables and kind of the why this performed well and why it didn't. And we'll we'll have some the some of those answers for you, right? And this this is the reason we're doing these experiments, so that we are on top of all of this new stuff and you don't have to worry about it. So third and final point is uh how are we gonna judge this experiment worked, right? So what success looks like looks like. We've kind of talked about what it looks like, but to you, Riley, uh what would you see a success? Like what's like a benchmark, right? Because a PMAX campaign performing on its own, like what does success with that look like? Like what do we if it does if it gets some results, like I guess how much how how higher results do we need to see this as a success, right?

Riley: I think that's hard um to answer right away, just because we don't have all of the variables in line currently. I think it's gotta be significant though, in order to show one between the two different campaign types and two whether you need a search campaign or not. Um it's kind of like a two-parter test a little bit, like which one does it run best for? Does it run best for like an e-commerce like product kind of campaign, or does it run best for like a um, you know, like a pro or a service-oriented B2B kind of kind of campaign? Um I've seen it work well well for both, honestly. Um but for the variables to like kind of test for what success looks like, honestly, it's gonna be really up to just uh comparing the two different campaign types and then comparing the campaign types against themselves when they do and when they don't have a search campaign running alongside them. I again I think it's gotta be significant. Um something that I'm probably gonna look out for is obviously how many conversions it's generating, what the conversion rate looks like, um maybe like CPAs, uh which are cost per acquisition. So like how much you're spending to get those conversions on average. Um it's really gonna be around a lot of the conversion data that we're getting or the conversion numbers.

Zac: So yeah, no, that's that's a great answer. I think first the experiment as a whole, right? So if we get results and if we get positive results from I mean what happens when we get if both campaigns just perform like the same, right? That'll be interesting to see. But I think I think the goal of this experiment is to at the end of the day, is to learn more about how PMAX campaigns perform when put into different situations and with different variables, right? So we're gonna look at them by themselves, which is the main part of the experiment, because we want to see if they actually need a search campaign, but we also want to see what success looks like and how we can find the most success with PMAX campaigns. So maybe they perform well alone, but they need these specific asset types or they need these specific, like targeting, like they need this, these specific things, right? Not targeting, it does on its own, but um I think that's what's gonna be really successful, right? Is we're gonna learn so much about PMAX campaigns, and we're gonna be able to say, okay, like this performed well because of this, this didn't perform well because of this, and we're gonna be able to find the best solution for PMAX campaigns for all of our clients. And if you in the audience want to learn more about PMAX campaigns, um, obviously we have experience with them, we do them for other clients, but uh we're also we can help you with that, right? And we're gonna be experts on them by the time we run this experiment. But uh yeah, I think uh I think it's gonna be awesome. I think it's gonna help us with like future campaigns and strategies, and I think, oh yeah, I'm just really excited about this.

Riley: It's it's a really interesting test because you hear a lot of different things, which up about the PMAX campaign, and if you're in digital space long enough, you hear people who are really high on them and who are really negative on them. So it's like, what's the truth? You know, like if you give it nothing and let it run, will it run? You know, like and will it do well? So yeah.

Zac: Well, I think that's that's an episode, Riley. I think we covered everything there. Um again, uh we told you why we're running this PMAX campaign. Um, we want to see if PMAX actually needs a search campaign, and we want to see how PMAX performs under different environments and different services, product products and services. And if it honestly, we're gonna we're gonna try a bunch of different stuff. So just stay tuned for that. Uh we talked about how we're setting it up, and we talked about like what success looks like for that. So that's a great episode. Um, as always, you can find our agency at antidote71.com, and all of our socials are there as well. Uh, so stay tuned to those socials because we're definitely gonna be posting more about this experiment as we get into 2026. Again, this is kind of a behind. The scenes before we even do it. So you're getting in on the ground floor. Definitely invest in it.

Riley: Just kidding.

Zac: Head to CTA Podcast.live to shoot us an email. We always take like questions. You can always comment on the actual like episode, like social post too, if you don't want to send us a voicemail or email. I'd be curious to see what people think of this experiment, especially other marketers. So feel free to feel free to reach out. Even better, you can always leave us a voice message on our hotline at 402-718-9971. As Rich always says, we do get calls there, but it's just spam. So maybe you could be the first call that's not spam, and that'd be a really awesome. Your question will make it into a future episode. And honestly, if you ask a question, it's going to be its own episode. We're going to roll out the bed quite. So uh as always, we'll see you next week. Thank you for being here, Riley. Uh, next week we'll probably do something similar to this, which is still going to be out. So stay tuned for something new and different. And uh yeah, we'll see you next week.