Worth knowing before Black Friday: when the promo window ends, the settings revert on their own.
That's the part we like. Nobody has to remember to pull the ROAS tolerance back on Monday morning.
FYI: promotion mode on Search and PMAX lets you set a temporary ROAS tolerance from 5% to 90% for a sale window.
Schedule the promo. Optionally boost budget. When it ends, settings revert.
Google's Ads PM says it also turns on Smart Bidding Exploration while the promo runs.
That's a lot of room for Smart Bidding to chase volume. Are you picking the tolerance on purpose, or leaving it wide open?
What we see most often with Meta-only DTC brands is that one bad week on Meta becomes a bad month for revenue.
Search and Shopping catch demand that's already out there.
If Meta went quiet for a week, what would still be selling?
This is the first conversation we have when a Shopify brand says the ads stopped working.
We check traffic quality, the site and the offer before we touch a single bid.
Which one would you look at first?
When conversion rate drops in BF week, the ads get blamed first.
In my experience it usually comes from one of 3 places:
1. Traffic quality. Where the clicks are coming from.
2. Website UX. Mobile, speed, navigation, the landing page.
3. The offer. Price, competitiveness, copy, social proof.
Shopify now lets you schedule and test discounts in Rollouts. So you can test #3 in October instead of on the day.
Which of the 3 bit you hardest last BFCM?
Feed, audiences, conversion data.
If any of the three is stale, PMAX spends the next month learning from it. A month out from Black Friday is when there's still time to fix it.
Back to work tomorrow, and Black Friday is just over a month out.
My Monday list for PMAX accounts is short:
Check the inputs. Is your Shopify product feed clean in Merchant Center? Are your Shopify and Klaviyo audiences up to date in Google Ads?
Check the conversion data. Does what Google sees line up with what the store actually booked?
Then leave the structure alone. Don't shock the system with big changes this close.
What's the first thing you're checking Monday morning?
Black Friday promos in Merchant Center:
Once you save, Google needs at least 24 hours and up to 72 to review the promotion before it can go live.
Starts Thanksgiving? Save it by Monday of that week.
When are your BFCM promos going in?
Black Friday is about five weeks out, and PMAX needs time to learn.
Three checks on our eCommerce accounts this week:
1. New holiday products go feed-only
2. Hero products get their own asset group
3. Brand exclusions go on
Mid-November changes get judged on half-learned data.
Full Pre-Black Friday PMAX checklist: xitter.cf/MenachemAni/status/211…
AI Max vs PMAX vs Shopping: What an eCommerce Account Actually Needs | jxtgroup.com/ai-max-vs-perfo…
Expanding our defenses against financial scam ads | blog.google/products/ads-com…
Google Has Now Removed the “Show More” Button. And That’s a Problem for Every Business Owner Relying on Organic Search. | jxtgroup.com/google-has-now-…
Are You Making This Common Creative Decision With Your YouTube Video Ads (That Could Cost Half Your YouTube ROI)? | jxtgroup.com/are-you-making-…
JXT Group - Google Ads Agency retweeted
Play a game with me! 🎮👇
Breaking down 5 popular marketing tactics and deciding whether to Keep, Delete, or Upgrade them.
Watch to see my thoughts on:
‣ Budget caps on top-performing campaigns
‣ Product listings
‣ Video strategy & UGC
How many do you agree with? 👇
#PPCChat #GoogleAds
We're lining promo start dates up against these category peaks before anyone picks a discount percentage.
xitter.cf/MenachemAni/status/211…
Google just published when holiday discounts tend to peak by category.
Are your promo dates lined up with when Search/Shopping demand spikes in your category?
#PPCChat
About five weeks to Black Friday. If you only do one thing from this list this week, start with the feed. It's what Google reads first.
xitter.cf/MenachemAni/status/211…
The one check we're running across every Shopify account: are the Black Friday promos in Merchant Center, with the right SKUs attached?
Each one goes through a policy review and a product check. Submit at least 24 hours before.
Guide your campaign spending with new priority and allocation features | blog.google/products/ads-com…
Google Has Now Removed the “Show More” Button. And That’s a Problem for Every Business Owner Relying on Organic Search. | jxtgroup.com/google-has-now-…
JXT Group - Google Ads Agency retweeted
Google's about to ship a PMAX option we've been asking for for years. 🎯
You'll be able to cap how much of a campaign's budget goes to partner networks, and set that cap as low as 0%.
PMAX bundles a lot of inventory together, and some of it is display and search-partner placements that spend your budget without doing much. For a long time you had no real say over that inventory.
The announcement has two parts: Channel Prioritization lets you tier channels as high or low priority, which only changes anything when the campaign is budget constrained. High-priority channels spend first at your target, the rest get the leftovers. That part's a nuance for most accounts.
Budget Allocation is the piece that matters. You can hold a low-priority channel to a percentage of daily budget, and 0% means it's off. That's a dial on the partner networks, not just a switch.
One caveat worth saying out loud: everything defaults to high priority, so nothing changes until you go set it yourself. Google isn't doing this for you.
Additionally, for Performance Max itself, you cannot disable specific Google channels like Gmail, Discover, or YouTube.
Google is pitching this as a pre-holiday control. If you're going to cap PMAX's partner networks, set it now, before Q4 spend ramps, not in the middle of peak when every dollar is working hardest.
If you run PMAX on a Shopify store and you've watched spend leak into placements you'd never pick, this is the setting to test first. Cap the partner networks, keep budget on the intent that converts, and see what your PMAX looks like without the padding.
Hoping we'll start to see the Channels sliders rolled out more widely soon too!














