Hey everyone,
Welcome back for another bite to chew on.
"Google really isn't a great platform for us. We plateau."
That is how most DTC operators describe Google Ads, and it is the line DigiCom hears most from the brands they talk to.
Brand search runs. Performance Max runs. The account harvests whatever demand already exists and never finds any more.
Every webinar we have done with DigiCom has been about Meta, and after each one, brands asked us to cover Google.
So we did.
Founder and CEO Hemant Varshney started his career running Google Ads 17 years ago. He joined us with co-founders Mike Constandatos and Danielle Dror, and director of growth Jake Orenstein.
They walked through the account structure they build for every brand they take on, and the placement data that made them kill one of their own campaigns.
The webinar was September 10, roughly two months from Black Friday. Read this one before you touch your Q4 budget.
On the Menu:
The three-campaign search structure, and why the brand campaign you think is wasted money is the cheapest defense you run
Why standard shopping still belongs next to Performance Max, and how to write feed titles Google actually ranks you for
The script that shows where PMax spend really lands (one campaign sent 65% to YouTube), plus the one Google campaign that scales like Meta
Redeem Your Free Audit
Most Google accounts have a leak you cannot see from inside the account.
A brand campaign quietly spending a third of its budget on non-brand terms.
A PMax campaign pushing dollars into display against customers you already have.
Finding those leaks is what the free audits DigiCom runs for COT readers are built for.
Each one takes 10 to 12 hours and covers structure, settings, keyword mining, feed setup, and where every dollar is actually going.
Ash has had one run on his own account and called it more in-depth than anything he has seen an agency come back with.
Three honest answers: Every audit ends in one of three verdicts: yes we can hit your goal, yes with X, Y, and Z changes, or no. Contracts only come after the audit and media planning.
One team, 20 plus channels: When it is a yes, the team that ran the audit builds the creative, writes the copy, and buys the media. Search, shopping, paid social, marketplaces, video, and display, with CRO recommendations included.
Limited Q4 slots: DigiCom caps the number of audits it takes each month, and they do not charge for them. As Ash put it: "If you are thinking about getting something set up for Q4, now is the time to do it. Don't wait."
The Three-Campaign Search Structure
1. Brand defense is not wasted money.
The question DigiCom gets most often is whether bidding on your own brand is a waste.
Jake's answer is a flat no.
"Your competitors might not be intentionally targeting your brand name, but they are absolutely serving ads to your brand name," he said.
Performance Max, AI Max, and broad match all identify what a product is and serve it against similar searches. If a competitor sells anything close to you, their ads are showing up on your name.
The control is a portfolio bid strategy on target ROAS or target CPA with a maximum cost per click cap.
Most brands never need to bid above $2 a click on brand, and Jake said they typically land at 30 to 40 cents. The cap is also what keeps the campaign honest.
The number one finding in DigiCom's audits is a brand campaign spending anywhere from 10 to 80 percent of its budget on non-brand terms.
Brand spend has to be isolated, or it is not brand spend.
2. The precision campaign is where you learn what converts.
The second campaign is non-brand exact match on your top converting search terms, organized into single themed ad groups so the ad copy speaks to exactly what the person typed.
Brand terms are negated out. Close variants are excluded.
Jake calls the result signal integrity: the search terms are the known variable, so you can test copy, landing pages, and image assets against them and trust what you learn.
The landing page is the second half of the ad.
"Continuity of message and message match is what makes search work," Jake said.
Brand traffic goes to a PDP or an offer page because those people are ready to buy.
Non-brand traffic needs a page that addresses what they searched for: listicles, advertorials, Five Reasons pages, review pages, competitor comparisons.
Break the chain anywhere, from query to ad to page, and you are paying for traffic the page cannot close.
3. The scaling campaign is a discovery engine, not an efficiency play.
The third campaign is where broad match and AI Max live.
You seed it with the kinds of terms that already work and let Google find adjacent queries.
It will find plenty of bad ones too.
That is why DigiCom is in the search terms report daily, or every other day at minimum, adding negatives.
It is the one task that decides whether this campaign scales or bleeds.
The job of this campaign is to feed the other one.
New converting terms graduate into the precision campaign and get their own themed ad group.
It will never be your most efficient campaign.
It is not supposed to be.
What you can do: Pull the search terms report on your brand campaign and count how much spend is going to non-brand queries. Then put a max CPC cap on it through a portfolio bid strategy so it can never drift back.
Standard Shopping Still Earns Its Place Next to PMax
1. Shopping is the highest-intent placement on Google.
Google has been pushing advertisers to run Performance Max only and let it handle shopping.
Jake's position: "That is not true."
DigiCom runs standard shopping alongside PMax in every account.
"People click on them when they are ready to make a purchase," he said.
They see the product image, the price, and every competitor lined up next to you.
In shopping, the visual is the bid, which is why DigiCom's audits so often flag product images too small or unclear to read.
The control argument decides it.
PMax spends across every placement on Google, and some weeks it spends in shopping while other weeks it does not.
A standalone shopping campaign puts budget directly into the placement that converts.
2. Single product ad groups give you controls PMax cannot.
DigiCom structures shopping as single product ad groups, one ad group per product.
When an attendee asked why not just run a feed-only PMax campaign, Mike's answer was control over which search terms hit which product.
If a skincare product is pulling hair care queries, a single product ad group lets you negate that term at the product level.
In PMax, you can only exclude at the campaign level, which means blocking it everywhere.
Danielle added the bid side. In a shopping campaign you can bid higher on a higher-LTV product.
PMax does not give you that lever.
The same structure handles inventory: pull back on a product running low, and set campaign priority so your best-selling variant leads instead of your slowest.
3. Your feed titles are your targeting.
You cannot target keywords in standard shopping or PMax.
Google decides when to show your product based on your feed, and the title carries most of that weight.
Jake put a good and bad example side by side.
The bad one read like a brand's internal name for a kit: a starter set with no product words attached.
The good one led with the kit name and kept going: non-toxic kids face cream, moisturizer, shampoo, safe skin care for kids.
Every one of those phrases is a query Google can now match.
Mike built those titles by pulling the search terms that triggered conversions across shopping and PMax and writing them back into the products.
Search volume went up, the products triggered more often, and the account scaled.
Use all 150 characters when you can, because better titles improve shopping and PMax at the same time.
"This is not set it and forget it," Jake said.
What you can do: Export the converting search terms from your shopping and PMax campaigns and rewrite your top product titles around them, using the full 150 characters. Then split your shopping campaign into one ad group per product.
Opening the Performance Max Black Box
1. Know where your PMax dollars actually land.
Performance Max serves across shopping, search, YouTube, Discovery, Gmail, display, and occasionally Maps, and Google's placement reporting still bundles channels together.
DigiCom runs a script that breaks out cost and conversions by placement.
Mike showed two campaigns to explain why.
The first was a consolidated non-brand campaign: roughly 20 percent of spend to search, most of the rest to shopping, and shopping producing most of the conversions.
That is the shape they want.
The second was a standalone hair care campaign that underperformed, and the script showed why: about 65 percent of spend had gone to YouTube.
They paused it and folded hair care back into the consolidated campaign as its own asset groups.
The script also splits brand from non-brand at the account level.
"We're never going to grow and scale within Google if we're spending all of our ad dollars on the branded side," Mike said.
And it catches the display leak. Push PMax past the volume it can deliver efficiently and the algorithm starts spending in display against your existing customers.
The fix is to tighten your target ROAS or CPA and add a brand exclusion.
2. There is no excuse for an average ad strength.
Mike's frame for asset groups is one Meta operators will recognize.
"Our asset group is essentially our audience, our ad set and our ad," he said.
The most common audit finding is an asset group sitting at Average ad strength, and it is the one part of PMax that is not a black box.
Google tells you exactly what is missing: three more horizontal images, one more 4x5 vertical.
"There is essentially no excuse as to why we aren't at that excellent score," he said.
Gemini resizes assets inside the ads platform, and Nano Banana Pro can generate the missing formats from a Merchant Center product shot.
The BFCM application is direct.
DigiCom builds seasonal asset groups the way you would build a seasonal Meta ad.
For Black Friday, that means an asset group where every headline is about gifting, savings, and family, driving to a landing page built around a gift set.
Test different gift sets in different asset groups and let the data pick the hero.
3. Demand Gen is the only Google campaign that scales like Meta.
Everything else in Google waits for someone to search.
Demand Gen does not.
"Demand Gen is impression based," Mike said. "The rest of Google is demand based."
It runs across YouTube, Discovery, and Gmail, and it spends what you give it.
Set a $100 daily budget and it spends $100.
That is the property most Google accounts are missing when they say the platform will not scale.
It is also the only Google campaign type that accepts a lookalike segment.
Build one off your top spenders or your last 90 days of site visitors and Google will find people who resemble them.
And unlike PMax, where you load 20 images and 15 headlines and hope, Demand Gen lets you A/B test five videos against five others and get a real answer.
The people it reaches in September are the ones who come back through shopping, search, and PMax in November.
Start warming them now.
What you can do: Run a placement breakdown on every PMax campaign, and where display or YouTube is taking spend without conversions, tighten the target and add a brand exclusion. Then launch a Demand Gen campaign seeded with a top-spender lookalike so a warm audience exists before Black Friday.
Sum It Up
Google does not plateau because the demand runs out.
It plateaus because most accounts are built only to harvest demand that already exists, never to find more.
On search: Run a capped brand campaign that defends your name, an exact match precision campaign built on message match, and a broad match scaling campaign you prune daily.
On shopping: Keep standard shopping running next to PMax, structure it one product per ad group, and write feed titles from the search terms that already convert.
On PMax and Demand Gen: Check where your PMax dollars land before you scale, fix Average ad strength today, and use Demand Gen to buy impressions instead of waiting for searches.
Every pattern in this recap came out of accounts DigiCom audited or runs today, and every one is easier to see from outside the account than inside it.
With Black Friday two months out, DigiCom is running a limited number of free audits for COT readers to find where your Google account is leaving growth on the table.
Let us know how we did...
All the best,
Ron & Ash