Growing Ecommerce – The Retail Growth Podcast

PMax vs. Standard Shopping? – 3 Google Ads Myths Busted

• Smarter Ecommerce • Season 4 • Episode 23

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In this episode of Growing eCommerce, Mike Ryan and Chris debunk three persistent myths that are still holding retailers back in 2026. While everyone is distracted by the hype of UCP and Agentic Commerce, many accounts are bleeding efficiency due to outdated structures like the "Heroes & Zombies" matrix and one-dimensional margin buckets.

We break down why these old-school tactics create self-fulfilling prophecies of failure and share what sophisticated retailers are doing instead to balance volume, margin, and the new reality of AI-driven search.

In this episode, we cover:

  • The "Zero Click" Wake-Up Call: Why the shift to walled gardens means you need to fix your tactical basics now before the ecosystem changes forever.
  • Myth #1: Heroes & Zombies: Why classifying low-volume products as "zombies" is a logical flaw that starves your potential growth engines. We explain the danger of using historical data to doom new products.
  • Myth #2: Margin Buckets: Why segmenting campaigns by gross margin % (e.g., 0-5%, 5-10%) is dangerous. Mike shares data showing how this ignores conversion volume and pricing strategies, leading to "death by optimization."
  • Myth #3: PMax vs. Standard Shopping: It’s no longer an either/or decision. We discuss the rise of hybrid setups and why Standard Shopping is actually gaining cost share again.

Key Takeaways:

  • Don't rely on single-dimensional data: Grouping products solely by ROAS or Margin % ignores critical context like seasonality, price competitiveness, and absolute profit.
  • Standard Shopping isn't dead: Even Google is now advocating for hybrid use cases, such as using Standard Shopping for query filtering or specific inventory control.
    +1
  • The "Self-Fulfilling Prophecy": If you put a new product in a "zombie" campaign with low budget because it has no data, it will never get data. You need a multi-dimensional scoring strategy.

About Mike Ryan

Based in Austria and originally from Boston, Mike Ryan is Head of Ecommerce Insights at Smarter Ecommerce (smec). With 10+ years in retail and PPC, and experience across retail operations, product management, and digital advertising, he helps online retailers turn data into strategies that improve performance in a highly competitive market.

About Christian Scharmüller

Christian Scharmüller is CCO & Managing Director at Smarter Ecommerce and a long-time expert in PPC and e-commerce. With 12+ years in ad tech, he’s

About Smarter Ecommerce (smec):

Smarter Ecommerce (smec) empowers e-commerce brands with AI-driven PPC automation that optimizes for profit and business outcomes while maintaining strategic control.

The platform activates first-party data - profit margins, customer lifetime value, and key business metrics - to automate campaign optimization toward goals like profitability and efficient growth, while detailed campaign insights provide full transparency and enable PPC teams to focus on strategic oversight rather than manual execution.

As a Google Premier Partner and three-time Microsoft Retail Partner of the Year, smec manages over €500 million in ad spend and drives €5B+ in annual e-commerce revenue for 350+ global retail clients including THG, Snipes, REWE, and Intersport.

Make sure to follow smec - Smarter Ecommerce for more performance marketing insights:

smec - Smarter Ecommerce: https://www.smarter-ecommerce.com
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Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/smarterecommerce/



Intro

SPEAKER_01

This is another episode of Growing E-Commerce. I'm one of your hosts, Mike. With me is Chris. I I just said your name. There it is. It's a special man. It's always a pleasure, Chris. And we are we stick to our routine again, right? Yeah, yeah, for sure. We're we're in production mode.

SPEAKER_00

We'll be bringing episodes with a dark channel. Uh for reasons we we talked about the last episode, but now we are fully back on track. Absolutely. And so topics get better. They will. I think so. Yeah, every week. Progressively progressive. Let's see. Let's see. But UCB was a big one, the last episode. That's right. Just the minor minor protocol we we talked about. But I think the topics today are somehow related. Somehow. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Let's let's let's do the segue. This is on you. Okay.

SPEAKER_01

You know, I'm in charge of the segues on this show.

SPEAKER_00

All the time, man.

SPEAKER_01

No, I'm just kidding. Yeah, so I mean, yeah, we're still early in the new year, okay? And um I think that, well, yeah, talking about UCP, one thing that I'm concerned about about these platforms having a huge amount of ownership. It feels like the the walled gardens are getting bigger. Like, you know, they're pushing the the boundaries of those walls out to encompass potentially all of e-commerce. Um, and I think that this could, if consumer adoption is good, it could trigger a next wave of e-commerce growth. Um, this is something Roman and I were just talking about the other day, by the way. But I my concern is that the spoils of that or the profits of that are gonna disproportionately go to um to the platforms. So that's I I think that it's gonna be e-commerce is already hard from a profit game, and it's gonna be even harder. And I I don't know, I feel like there are myths or practices. Some of these have been around for years, and it would be really time that we kind of leave them in the past uh because this is a wake-up call, in my opinion.

What is UCP (Universal Context Protocol)?

SPEAKER_00

It's a wake-up call, and maybe maybe I can add another perspective to that. Because uh last episode we talked about the UCP, and it's basically this confirmation that Google is going also the direction to this final end state, target state, the zero click buying environment. We talked about that many times last year. The future of e-commerce, we call it. There's also a graph, maybe we can show it, um, where what these two lines intersect sometime, and and the the ecosystem as we know it right now will not disappear, but it will be fundamentally less relevant. But we also talked last episode that it is this is not a speed put and it's not happening over time overnight, and it will take time. And and I feel somehow the danger that uh due to this hype, a lot of decision makers are now forcing the teams to focus on on that new big thing where which is big, but it's not happening overnight, and all the other rather tactical but super important shit, yeah, with regards to your main campaigns such as PMAX, it's just not as important anymore. And um I think this is also some of the connection to to what we talked about last year. Yeah. Don't focus your don't lose your focus on on the things which matter now. Yeah, yeah. And I think there are still massive flaws and myths out there how to to manage your paid search campaigns, especially PMAX. And I think it's worth to talk about them. Yeah. Uh and uh I think there are a couple of them, which which are really still out there, and I I don't get it why. Yeah, honestly speaking.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, for sure. I I mean a great point, by the way. I just to like even if even if UCP uh and and like agentic shopping and all this stuff would go so vertical right now, ads are not going anywhere. Ads, ads will be in these properties as well. The campaign types that we know right now are not going anywhere in the near term. Yes. There's still gonna be shopping campaigns, there's still gonna be PMAX campaigns, sure search campaigns. Google is retrofitting them a bit, like AI Max for search, etc. But this stuff is still the fundamentals at the moment.

SPEAKER_00

And guess what? It's still the core product of Google, and it this won't change for sure the next couple of years. So I think it's worth to talk about these myths, and uh, we're not tired of bringing them up because it's hurting the performance of of online retailers. And um not every myth is is that easy to fix or to maybe to understand, but let's talk about them.

SPEAKER_01

Sure, we brought five with us, but we're on a little tight time box. Let's see how many we can get. Let's see.

SPEAKER_00

By the way, one thing I have to say. Congrats to the registration numbers of your webinar. Oh, thanks. Yeah. When was it, two weeks ago? Yeah, with with Ginny, yeah. Um, exactly. Track Day 800? Yeah. Man. Man. I I have to bring it up because I can remember the first webinar Smart E-Commerce did. I stumbled across uh a photo. Yeah. Shout out to Reinhard Einwagen. I don't know because he's not not with us anymore, but uh, we had 25 registrants and we were super happy about it. We were happy about it. Yeah, yeah. We had the old school headsets on. I show you the photo. Oh, and uh and and I I saw the number, 800 registrants, man. It's it's it's this is this is this is Champions League, man. Thanks, man. I appreciate it. Well, yeah, I mean Shout out to everyone. Smack you, marketing team. It's it's it's awesome.

The Infrastructure War: Google vs. OpenAI

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I appreciate it. I mean, so just uh for listeners who don't know, I just had I had a conversation with uh Ginny Marvin and we talked about AI Max that I was just mentioning. Ginny Marvin is the I mean, let's face it, she's the top ad spokesperson for Google, and that's 80% of their revenue and they're valued at four trillion bucks. So yeah, so I I actually all the credit is due to Ginny. You need a dancing partner. No, but uh yeah, so we had a great chat about that, and it's on YouTube. You can go check it out on our YouTube channel. Sorry for offrailing our conversation, but let's go back to the myths. Yeah, all right. No, no, thanks. Um so um let's start. You want to st you want to run off chorus and because this is one of my favorite myths. Yeah, I'm just still we're still facing it. Do you know it was like two years ago, probably, I did a whole 45-minute monologue on this topic, actually. I know. Yeah, but it was not it was not not big enough because the myth is still out there. No, I said some of these things, uh the next one too has been around. So hold on, let's just get a cut to the chip.

SPEAKER_00

Uh heroes and zombies. And why is this so important to me? Because there is a fundamental logical flaw in it. And I would like to tackle this today, together with you. Um and look, uh to all the listeners and uh out there, we we we are quite big in what we do. So we we have we have a good new client acquisition pace. So we are we are constantly in contact with big online retailers about helping them to do their PMAX uh paid search uh more efficiently, more effectively, whatever. Part of that is that we analyze a lot of accounts. So we see hundreds of times a year that big advanced players sometimes still are very, very heavily focusing on the idea to have this heroes zombies approach. And this is what really is is hurting me because there is a flaw in that approach. Like you're the expert. What's your take on it?

SPEAKER_01

Uh well, let's outline what what we're talking about. What it is. What we're talking about here. Heroes and zombies, also known as bleeders and leaders. Uh I can't remember. I've seen different names for it. Um Stars and Poor Dogs, yeah. Yeah, that's the it was originally the BCG matrix. This goes back uh years back, and someone based uh this was a tactic on Amazon before it became popular on Google Shopping and Google PMAX. Um but the idea is to basically create a four-box uh model or matrix like of volume and efficiency. So um basically low volume, high volume on one axis, and um low efficiency, high efficiency, or yeah, ROS on the other. And um the so the idea here is that um you can kind of wake up your zombie products or get these are there's a lot of products on Google Ads that are not gonna get as many impressions, not gonna get as many clicks, um, and therefore not get as much conversion. And and part of that is just a fundamental of the channel or of any channel actually, but Google Ads is a demand capture channel. It matches products against search volume. And if there's no search volume for a given product or category, there there will not be a lot of impressions or clicks for that. So some of that is fundamental, and some of it can be a shortcoming of Google's algorithms and stuff like that, your structure. So it it's uh it's an area where you can kind of you can bend that curve, but you can never change it. Um yeah, and then you'll have like, you know, your your kind of unsung hero type products and your hero products and stuff like that. It's a way of just classifying your products, making, I guess, four campaigns and letting it run.

SPEAKER_00

Yes. What is the big issue there from your perspective? Um there are a few big issues.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah.

2026 Predictions: How fast will Agentic Commerce scale?

SPEAKER_00

There's more than one. Yeah, fair enough. Or should I start with within the You can start, go for it, Chris. Uh kill me for it. But the uh this this approach, A, it's it's very much one-dimensional. You you just look at basic historical performance, product performance. Yeah. Which for sure is not going to make the cut uh from our perspective, because historical product performance is by its design leading you into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because the accounts we see is there's this zombie bucket, and the zombie bucket are products with low demand, low performance, you you might call it. Um the issue there is that uh these zombies are most of the time a very big chunk of your product portfolio because that's the nature of the game you play, right? Especially P-MAX, it's a lazy campaign that focusing on the top sellers. And every one online retailer wants to grow. Where's the incremental growth? Yeah, it's certainly not within your top seller because that's what P-MAX is good at. And you max out what you have there. So actually, it should be rather the long-tail-ish part of your product assortment. Yeah, that's what needs advertising pressure. Exactly. And this is in your zombie bucket where most of the retailers put low budget on and very restrictive rurals because these are the the bad kits of the block. And I'm like, where should the growth come from? Yeah. And another major flaw, sorry, I'm emotional uh talking about this. Another major flaw is uh, and this is really a real thing, new products by design will end up in a bucket maybe zombie or a bucket where low efficiency because there is none, it's a new product, and low volume because it's a new product again. So you lead your whole account into a massive self-fulfilling prophecy. And I'm not talking about that product performance shouldn't be a part of your campaign structure strategy, but not the only one, and not done this way. Yeah. And I I hate this approach. I hate that it's still out there. I hate that all the scripts praise themselves that this is the holy grail because it's not, and it's a myth, and um, I don't like it. Tell us how you really feel. Um but what what's your take on it?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, well, here I come in. I'm Mr. Even I'm Mr. Even Keel.

SPEAKER_00

Nah, come on. I get be on my side, man.

SPEAKER_01

At least one. I'm on I'm all I'm on your s I'm on your side. Uh, but I'm I'm just, you know.

SPEAKER_00

No, even in our uh fair enough.

The Adoption Debate: 5% vs 10% Market Share

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. No, no, uh I I actually I don't I I just I don't have anything to I agree fully with what you said. Spit it out, Mike.

SPEAKER_00

I know it's hard to say. Yes, I I agree with you.

SPEAKER_01

It's like that. I told you that that message I got from Steffi where she was like, I hate to say it. Oh, I hate to say it, but I was like, I was right about something, wasn't I? But uh anyway. No, you're totally right. No, I I just want to say I I'm just uh I don't usually get as hot under the collar about it. But there are several problems here. It's exactly as you said. Um I mean it's great. What's good about this is that these products are not in a campaign with like bestsellers where they're competing, they're getting starved of oxygen. They can at least get a dedicated budget. Um, but you do, you need to actually be willing to invest in them. So you're gonna have to like ease up on that Rose target, you're gonna have to grant it a certain budget or nothing will change. They're not they're they're not going to be efficient, at least not like you have to really look at them as a group as well, not as individual products. But um there's just other things like you know, how do you exactly set the thresholds the thresholds right here? How do you set the thresholds? That's actually non-trivial. Um and the reality is that there's like uh a fifth quadrant in any type of quadrant analysis, usually, which are question marks, things that are not stable. Um so i as you said too, it's it's based on historical data. Google's actually, believe it or not, their our algorithm is also based on historical data. They they're working on this. Um I guess there's a concern that if something didn't perform well once that it gets doomed to never perform, or something like that. There's a bit of fact and fiction there, I think. Um but it's it's really a form of double optimization because Google is already looking at the performance and working on that. You need to do something different. Yes, yes, on top incremental. Exactly. Now, like I mean, the way we think about it, first off, is to view things more multidimensionally. Um so that you're not thinking this is it's fine if you want to consider this, but you should consider other things too, because it's insufficient. Where's the strategic layer, right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

If it's really just volume and return net spend, let's say, where is the what where are your business objectives reflected? Yeah. Let alone the the problem of the self-fulfilling prophecy and the fact that these scripts, most of them are static. So once the product is in a bucket, setting the right thresholds, there are so many problems. But the strategic data layer, is it really just about volume and roars? I guess I hope for for for all the listeners, there's more to it. So yes, I co-sign that. What one would one would hope.

SPEAKER_01

Uh one would hope, yeah. Yeah, sure. But um Yeah, but I mean, and the other thing is like the as I said, this fact and fiction thing about these things, like it's very hard to discern which of these are stinkers and are gonna stay that way forever, and which of them actually have potential. Because individually, none of them have enough data. They might have no clicks to make a decision on at all. Let's say it has um one click and or let's let's say that it has like, I don't know, 50 clicks and and one conversion. You don't have a statistically you don't have a statistically valid way of making decisions. Um so that's that's a huge probe.

Winners & Losers: SMBs vs. Marketplaces

SPEAKER_00

Another thing, and maybe we can because I've it it's it's emotional dragging. Go for it, go for it. We go then to myth number two. I'm I'm not that emotionally attached. I'm emotionally attached to myth number two, yeah. Yes, let's go. All right, but one mile stamping a lot, myth one. Um kill me for it, but uh I think a lot of online retailers have seasonality. I assume how like again, so setting the thresholds and what what what period of time are you are you calculating the thresholds? I assume you have products which are in the off-season are just stinkers. Yeah, yeah. Uh so but and the static approach to this this this this this concept. Like I said, another another flaw, I think, and to all the listeners out there, please overthink that. Yeah. And if you have no clue how to overthink it, talk to us or to any any other experts out there. There are a lot of people who, by the way, co-sign what we're talking about here now.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, for sure. Um I actually my my pal Chris Gutknecht, um at I love him, man. Yeah, he's he's he's great. At Bergzeit, he uh you know he's on the retailer side and he gave an excellent presentation a couple years ago, two, three years ago.

SPEAKER_00

Uh Kemp, I think.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, exactly. At this uh really nice German um search marketing conference, and he gave a killer presentation about this topic.

SPEAKER_00

By the way, shout out Maya, shout out to Mr. Goodkeft when I bought his studio. He's been on this podcast before. Yeah, yeah. No, really, really. Really? Great, great online shop, great guy. They know what they're doing. Yes. All right. So myth number two, you are emotionally attached to that.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Tell me why this wakes you up, Edman.

The New SEO: 12+ New Data Feeds & Attributes

SPEAKER_01

Well, you know, when when I got started in this business, margin splits were advanced. Margin splits were only created. Yeah, that was the thing. Yeah. Yeah, it was a big deal. And the idea behind this is that um you basically take your uh your products and you look at the gross profit margin percentage, uh, not the gross profit for each item. And then you can create some bins. So you can have, you know, whatever looks nice, a bin for 0 to 5% or 0 to 10%, and then 10 to 20%, whatever, um, and onwards. And then you can use this uh as a campaign structuring tool. And you can set different ROAS targets and budgets for those different bins. Sounds well it yeah, it's but you know, I I'm also I don't want to be judgmental, I don't want to be gatekeeper-y. I think every step that you take in the direction of making your campaigns more profitable is good. And having your margin data reflected in your product feed through a custom label or actually submitting your cost of goods sold, this is overall a great step that's very informative. Right direction. Yeah, for sure. For sure. But um the problem with these margin buckets is that it's uh well, it's again one-dimensional. You're s segmenting your campaigns just on one dimension, or you might combine it with a category or something like that, but it's still a simplistic model. Um and the other thing is that uh I think as I said earlier, people choose buckets that look nice, or that perhaps their chief financial officer handed down to them.

SPEAKER_00

Like see if see if O'Slaught approached, by the way.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I know for sure. Yeah, I know, I know too. I I'll tell you a story about that. Um because I've seen this absolutely destroy businesses. And I uh yeah, this is why now I'm gonna start kidding. Because I I tried to change someone's mind. I tried so hard to help them and I I couldn't. Okay. Um But uh the problem is that yeah, basically um people look at this um like they they'll make very simple buckets that are that make sense kind of uh like five to ten percent or whatever, these kind of things are zero. It doesn't matter, but they choose these nice even percentages, and then they don't actually think about how their data might be distributed amongst that. Um and the simplest thing that you can do is make a histogram uh uh to understand, okay, where is the distribution of profitability and then map that by the way, okay, here's the distribution of products within that. What is the distribution of my conversions against these buckets? Because this stuff matters. Yes. Um because like Google doesn't care what your gross profit margin is, and that's why it's great to put to bring the information into the conversation, but you need to reconcile this. So I'll put a couple examples up on screen for people who are watching. Um but in one example, um, and I I pulled these from the wild, so this is this is stuff that I see. Um they had 10% increments in gross margin buckets. And you can see um the way their products are distributed there. It's almost it's distributed mostly in the 10 20 to 30% bucket and the 30 to 40 percent bucket, which is not surprising. That's a common gross profit margin range for e-commerce. Um, and then their conversions, though, are almost entirely concentrated in one single bucket. So this information alone is insufficient for segmenting. It it does there's not enough variation in there. It doesn't matter. Or you'd have to make drill down that 30 to 40 percent bucket. Does this really make sense? I don't probably think so. Yeah. Um makes sense.

SPEAKER_00

Makes sense. May I add something here? Sure, sure. Just maybe just another angle. And again, uh also from the wild, uh, not data-driven, but based on conversations I have and what what I've seen in in in um is hundreds of account analysis we did the last couple of years. Um because there's there's the the the approach on the one hand, uh, and then there is how it is executed on the other hand. What I also see most of the time is that again, uh because it's one-dimensional, uh it's leading to kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. What do I mean? If you have, let's say, a high margin bucket and a low margin bucket, yeah. What the CFO wants is clear. Push the high margin products. But if you just cluster based on the uh on the criteria high margin, there might be a lot of stinkers in there. There might be a lot of products in there no wasn't no one is interested in. So you mix uh good products with bad products uh based on the feedback from the market, right? And you try to steer them one way, which is aggressively pushing into market because you have high margins there. But you have a lot of products in there which are not supporting your strategic business goals, which are just not demanded, and so forth. So again, you Are because it's one-dimensional, you're leaving out a lot of information which is highly relevant to Google. Yes. Am I right here? Because again, this is it just doesn't make sense.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, this is like, you know, our our philosophy on this, we believe in score in your products. Multi-dimensional.

SPEAKER_00

It's has to be one factor.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, exactly. A balance, a balance of multiple things. You can just quantify this into a simple into a simple score, and you don't need huge amounts of account complexity. You can have a relatively simple campaign structure with like, you know, for just in a dumb example, just high, medium, low score, just like that. Um, and then different products can end up in those campaigns for totally different reasons. For different reasons, exactly.

SPEAKER_00

And another thing, maybe just just one last thing, because uh again, uh sorry to to to talk out of out of butt here sometimes, but it's uh the conversation that the CFOs love that structure for for obvious reasons. Um but the CFO has no, I mean, sorry to all the CFOs listeners, but they have no fair enough, they have no clue what what's going on in the Google universe. You just lost us one follower.

SPEAKER_01

One follower, Chris.

SPEAKER_00

By the way, there was one CFO following this podcast and we lost him. Yeah. Uh sorry, sorry about that. But but um I I know him and I give him a call and I say sorry, no, just kidding. But because the the buckets are based on on relative margin, right? A 5% to 15% bucket. Uh so it's fair, you make more margin with a product in relative terms. But what it is all about at some point of time is the absolute margin creation, right? And if I can sell way more, way more low margin products because there's the demand in the market, it has to be balanced. Yeah, I know. So yeah, it's it's it's yeah, I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm wrong. I'm also emotionally attached to this one.

SPEAKER_01

See, I think you're that's a great point because then you're you're maximizing your percentage margin, which this can lead to a death by optimization scenario. Absolutely. I love that.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, death by optimization. We have to leave it there, it it can't get any better.

SPEAKER_01

Exactly. I I mean I have a couple more scenarios here. I just want to run through one real quick. Yes, go ahead. I just showed you a case where there wasn't enough variance in their margins. Now I'm showing a case where there is. They're using 0 to 5% buckets, and they have um, you know, looks like kind of a bell curves type distribution in here. Uh mostly concentrate around 25 to 30 percent, which is a typical e-commerce margin, it makes sense. But the thing is that their conversions split. It's also bell curve shape, but the bell curves don't perfectly overlap. It's like having double vision. And the conversions are weighted toward all of the lower margin products. So there's more conversions in the amongst those, and there's less. And that's because there's another factor here, again, multidimensional. There's this invisible hand of pricing. Their prices are presumably more attractive on this, so they have to reconcile those things.

SPEAKER_00

And by the way, which makes perfect sense, right? If you're pricing more aggressively, your margin is probably lower. But but this is the margin volume game, which is completely left out there. Yeah. Lower the prices, less margin, but more volume, overall, more absolute margin.

SPEAKER_01

So this this was this was hot shit in 2016, but it's 2026 now, it's 10 years later.

SPEAKER_00

And still, a lot of retailers think this is this is the way to go. And ladies and gents, I uh I I promised myself to be more bold this year. It is not good. Good. We can leave it there. Mike. So it was very bold. It is not. But we explained why why this is uh so Mike.

SPEAKER_01

Um we have a couple of minutes. Yeah, I know. I'm gonna have to skip my CFO example, but they I I showed them beautifully in data how they already left the building the CFO, so you can't talk open again. They I showed beautifully in data how they were destroying this whole account um by over-segmenting by a margin, and they they never they didn't change it.

Protocol Wars: Why Google will likely win

SPEAKER_00

Maybe we do an episode about the the the most awkward and and and substantial, maybe also substantial discussions we had with with uh with decision makers. Well they just try to listen. Not just CFOs, no, but it could be a good topic. Because sometimes really interests of certain, I don't know, decision makers or departments of the company are really massively interfering with what should actually be done in a Google Yats account. Yes, that's right. I think we have a rich history here too, where where it's really about balancing these interests. Yeah. Do we have enough time for one more myth?

SPEAKER_01

Um one more. One more. Uh what do you want to do, Chris?

SPEAKER_00

Uh uh one where we are both not emotionally attached to it. Is there is no there this is there?

SPEAKER_01

I I care about all of these so much.

SPEAKER_00

Me too, unfortunately. Ros, could be a quick one.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, but I feel yeah, okay. Yeah, we can do that. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Or or shop shopping and PMAX and other war. Also interesting.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, maybe let's go with that one, okay? Yes.

SPEAKER_00

I feel like there's there's there's more to it. Okay. Okay. I do the the intro. All right. At least one intro. Okay. Uh, and you you just jump on. I'm I'm game. So I have to look for the myth now. Uh here we here we go. Myth number three we want to tackle today as part of our beloved podcast. PMAX versus shopping, standard shopping, is it an either or decision? Yeah. And for a lot of people it is, but myth. Come on. Let's go.

SPEAKER_01

Well, and and you know, and by the way, this is something um like another one of our some of our myths on here used to be true, and they're just they're not anymore. And this like I actually spoke with the Google product manager years back when they were starting to roll out PMAX or is still in beta or whatever, and um, we're talking about this default priority that PMAX had. And they were, they told me back then that there were no plans to sunset shopping, because that's what everyone was wondering back then. Will standard shopping campaigns go away? And they said that's not going to happen, but we want there to be an either-or decision. If you want to keep using standard shopping, you can, but it is an either-or decision between PMAX and standard shopping. Um and, you know, boy, that's must be 18 months ago or so now that that default priority of PMAX went away. And we've received actually we've received decks from our Google partners um kind of advocating or highlighting use cases of PMAX shopping hybrid setups, which I fell out of my chair the first time that's.

SPEAKER_00

I was putting it forwarded to me.

SPEAKER_01

Um I probably said it, Chris, I just fell out of my chair. You will too. And uh and also very recently, it's a little thing in the user interface, but when you're creating a new shopping campaign, um that you'd choose, I want to focus on the shopping channel, and then Google would say, try PMAX. And they stopped doing that default behavior now. They're letting you, if you say, I want to do shopping, you can choose between these experiences or campaign type technologies. So um meanwhile, what we've seen is that and I have a chart for this too that I'll put on screen for people listening, but you can see in the data that um in you know 2022, it was very either or. People were using either shopping or PMAX. Um, but and and that changed a lot during the adoption phase of PMAX, um, where yeah, PMAX gained a lot of market share. But steadily over the years, hybrid setups have become more popular. And yeah.

SPEAKER_00

And the cost share of standard shopping is slightly increasing, right?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00

It's not going away, at least. That's what we can say.

Summary & Outro

SPEAKER_01

Basically, PMAX is losing cost share. Yeah. So shopping is having a bit of a revival right now. Um and the but back to the core myth, like, is it an either-or decision? I mean, the fact is that these still they don't play perfectly nice together, but that's why you need to have a managed strategy in place. You need to have, or rather, you need to have a strategy, what you're doing and why. Am I gonna advertise products in both technologies? If so, how am I gonna make that work? Am I gonna um choose this for that? Like how what am I gonna do? Um, and so that's where we are now.

SPEAKER_00

Can you can you come up with with an example? Perfectly together.

SPEAKER_01

Um, I mean, I think one of the the most kind of clear-cut examples that you can do is um let's say you want to exclude brand traffic from PMAX um and you want to pick that up with standard shopping. That was this brand catcher strategy for a while. Um but now there are more kind of proper controls in place. I think that's still a strategy that makes perfect sense because um you're well, yeah, i there's always details in here, but there's a a query differentiation because you you're aver you can advertise the same products in both, but you have a deferring query strategy there, um, or like which search terms you want to appear for, which kind of intent you want to appear for. That's one. Um people will do something like putting um best sellers or social ones that do really well on social media where they've got strong assets, they might do those in PMAX. Because they have the assets, um the pro let's say the the products are profitable enough to justify the remarketing that occurs. Um, all the things that are in PMAX, that can make sense. Then you might have other products where it's like, this thing doesn't need to be in PMAX. I don't have good assets for this, or it's not profitable for me enough to justify I don't want to spend remarketing on this. Um, that kind of thing. Yeah. So these are all the different there's a million different strategies. But it's important that you understand um that these are like yeah, brother, it's a sibling rivalry. They're like brothers or sisters who don't quite get along, but they can play nicely together. Yes. Um you just need to manage it.

SPEAKER_00

Three three days a week. At least that's with my two boys. Three days. Three days a week, they're they're nice to each other. The little one now for 15 months, he starts to throw some punches at the big one. But when they play nice together, nicely together, oh, it's awesome. Yeah. And that's what you should be aiming for, right? Exactly. Yeah, now I can go work on something else. No. But I think the statement is it's not an idol war. Uh I think it's even, like you said, it's e it's even advocated by Google, which which should be a clear sign. Yeah. Um, and there are strong use cases. If you do it the right way, that you can you can boost your performance by utilizing both technology.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, and I I I think, you know, from my standpoint, I'm pretty neutral about if you do or do not do this. I think you need to have a use case in mind. There needs to be a business reason why you're doing this. You're introducing an additional level of complexity to your account. So there just has to be a reason why, a st um a strategy, and you're good. You you know, there are tactics that you'll deploy. But um, yeah, that's something that I think we're gonna see that trend just increasing um this year.

SPEAKER_00

I I think so, yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Uh for sure. It there's no reason it's been increasing, and I think it will continue to do so.

SPEAKER_00

For sure. And ladies and gentlemen, if you you probably saw on our uh uh listened uh or heard that we're rather neutral on this. There's not that much emotion involved. Uh we wanted to ask podcast uh on a rather calm note, but it's an important one. Yes. And done right, it can really have a massive impact on on your on your on your um performance. Um myth one and two, marching split and somber hero approach. We are we are rather bold on that. But this one, I think it's a it's a great thing to also look out for how it is developing this year. Yeah, and again, we we see it more and more that that clients are actively also asking for it. Yeah, exactly. What strategies can be implemented with a hybrid approach? So it's uh fascinating. And uh honestly, I'm still attached to to standard shopping a bit. It's for me the OG channel. The the thing I I love it.

SPEAKER_01

My my I've said this uh dozens of times over the past few years. Standard shopping isn't broken. Nope. Standard shopping still works, still works. Okay, so yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Love to see it still in it.

SPEAKER_01

But we're out of time for today, so the other couple myths maybe we can pack them in another episode.

SPEAKER_00

Let's let's let's go for it.

SPEAKER_01

Let's try it out.

SPEAKER_00

But in the meanwhile, um we'll send it off. Man, I did one by the way. Well, I did the intro last year, right? Last episode. Yeah. Once a year?

SPEAKER_01

I think so. Yeah, once a year.

SPEAKER_00

So I do another massive commitment. Uh I'm up for another one intro this year.

SPEAKER_01

This year. All right. 2026 goes.

SPEAKER_00

Exactly. Maybe, maybe at 2x and do two intros this year, but let's see.

SPEAKER_01

All right.

SPEAKER_00

I'm gonna hold you to it.

SPEAKER_01

All right. So um thanks for thanks for listening, everyone. This has been another episode of Growing E-Commerce brought to you by Smarter E-Commerce, also known as SMEC. You can learn more at smarter-e-commerce.com. And as always, if you feel like leaving us a review or a rating on your podcast platform of choice, we really appreciate us. Give us a shout out on social media. We're friendly, we don't bite. Um, and we'll we'll see you next time. Thank you. Thanks, Chris.