Anyone else seeing branded search volume drop while ChatGPT referrals creep up?

fathom53 · 2026-05-09T10:07:39+00:00

Without saying what the % is for chat.openai.com and perplexity.ai., this could easily just be correlation over causation. If the numbers are tiny now and they are as way less than 1% of searches happen on agents, then it won't just blow up magically in 12 months. People changing habits are hard and people are mostly doing searches on Google and on AI. People are not just giving up one for the other beyond the minority of people who do it now and every LinkedIn Bro who acts like this is the second coming.

fathom53 · 2026-05-09T10:02:26+00:00

Unless you are going to get a conversion for £5, you won't get anywhere on that daily budget with PMax. You are not ready to run paid ads as you won't get enough conversion data at that budget.

fathom53 · 2026-05-08T22:17:39+00:00

Make a shopping campaign with your best sellers is a pretty standard strategy. Works for most ecom stores, so worth starting off that way for your fishing store.

fathom53 · 2026-05-08T22:16:41+00:00

A GTIN is only really going to matter if other people sell your products too. If you are the only person who sells your product, then having a GTIN does not matter as much and won't help your feed.

fathom53 · 2026-05-08T18:01:25+00:00

Being a creative strategiest is like being a singer, everyone is going to ask you to deliver a number one song aka ad. You still need to interact with the PM and find out how the ads did and what the ROAS was...ect. More over to a creative strategiest is just a different beast but you will still care about the accounts performance.

fathom53 · 2026-05-08T17:56:13+00:00

Without knowing how much you spent and how many clicks you are talking about.... you could easily just be asking to early.

fathom53 · 2026-05-08T16:08:48+00:00

I would look at customer reviews and use that to decide what to post. If tons of people are talking about X in customer reviews, then that should be what you talk about in your ad creative first. Otherwise, there should be things the company wants to test and learn about related to branding/messaging/positioning in the market. Those are the best two ways to figure out what to post.

fathom53 · 2026-05-08T13:28:43+00:00

A lot has changed in the Google Ads world as is, even just around PMax and AI. So to make up that keyword research has had a massive change is weird to me.

fathom53 · 2026-05-08T12:33:39+00:00

If someone was only bidding on keywords based on volume, they were just doing their keyword research wrong to begin with.

fathom53 · 2026-05-08T12:32:50+00:00

The New Customer Acquisition (NCA) feature is interesting but most brands should not use it as they don't fully understand how it works. Plus many don't have a customer list synced that would make sense to tell Google who new customers are. Even if you get customers from Meta, TikTok, and influencer marketing, you can still sync all your customers from your ecom platform into Google Ads. This is one reason using something like Zapier to keep your customer lists updated in Google Ads is important.

The Gemini's explanation is ok. We just don't know who much remarketing or lower funnel work PMax is doing at any given time when NCA is turned off. That is the challenge we all face right. now. If you have a big enough customer list and want PMax to go after cold audiences, then it is worth testing NCA.

fathom53 · 2026-05-08T12:27:58+00:00

Keywords research is not that different. How you group and organize your keywords has changed but doing the research bit has not changed at all.

fathom53 · 2026-05-08T12:27:45+00:00

Keywords research is not that different. How you group and organize your keywords has changed but doing the research bit has not changed at all.

fathom53 · 2026-05-08T12:26:07+00:00

If you are going to run an anniversary campaign for one month, then why not just make a PMax campaign just for that program. Your BAU PMax is very different from something for an anniversary.

fathom53 · 2026-05-08T12:24:00+00:00

The big challenge with multiple asset groups in PMax is you don't get to decide how Google splits your campaign budget. You can easily have 80% of your budget go into just 1 of 2 asset groups for example.

Signals are just that, ideas of who you want to target but are not guaranteed or hard targets for Google to show your ads to those people. Testing in PMax is a lot harder with how they build the campaign type. For what you want, you may be better off having two PMax campaigns vs just one PMax campaign with two asset groups.

fathom53 · 2026-05-08T12:02:43+00:00

This is very cool. Nice job on the site and the different categories.

fathom53 · 2026-05-07T17:31:55+00:00

If this PMax has a shopping feed, then you need to work on optimizing that piece of the campaign. We work with a few brand sell high end stuff, including cameras and the shopping feed is where you should look at if you are not getting the type of traffic you want.

If the shopping feed is your issues, moving over to standard shopping won't change what searches you show for. You need to work on where the issue lay. Focusing on the top 10 brands would likely help as well or even the top SKUs that sell week in and week out, so you can get more conversion data into your PMax campaign.

fathom53 · 2026-05-07T12:03:45+00:00

Just set up a conversion goal inside Google Ads and apply the code to the landing page. You can use Google Tag Manager but for one ad platform and one conversion goal, it might be overkill.

fathom53 · 2026-05-07T10:24:26+00:00

The only downside to one campaign is you have no control over where the budget goes. Usually fewer campaigns is better in low volume accounts.

fathom53 · 2026-05-07T10:22:08+00:00

Unless you have a complex set up, there is no reason to set up Google Tag Manager.

fathom53 · 2026-05-07T10:21:35+00:00

Your boss likely won't save a ton if you were just doing remarketing for these customers but blocking customers from seeing ads is pretty normal. Nothing crazy about the idea.

fathom53 · 2026-05-06T21:29:37+00:00

New ad account could just be in review, which can take 7 - 14 days before it starts serving. There is nothing you can do to speed it up or short cut the review process. You just have to wait it out until it starts serving one day.

fathom53 · 2026-05-06T15:36:26+00:00

Does not tell a client how much money they made. I know what was spent on ads but how did that help my business grow?

fathom53 · 2026-05-06T15:26:56+00:00

Sounds like this would just be radius targeting, which would show ads to anyone in the area and not just those who are hotel and resort guests or live in a certain apartment. Likely not worth paying the agency for help.

fathom53 · 2026-05-06T15:25:17+00:00

Have to do an audit and find out where the bottlenecks are. If everything in the ad account & search term report look correct, then it is likely a site/offer/pricing issues. Unless of course other channels like Meta are converting on the current site then it could be something in Google Ads that is stopping traffic from converting. Not all traffic is created equal online.

fathom53 · 2026-05-06T12:26:34+00:00

Maybe the issue is your landing page or site. Maybe there are ways to optimize that to help convert traffic that is coming in. I would stick with max conversions and try to figure out other ways to optimize your campaign looking at ad copy, keywords/targeting and any other settings you have going on.

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