"Search Themes", the New Signal

Google Performance Max introduces a new beta feature, "Search Themes," allowing advertisers to enhance campaign targeting by leveraging their industry expertise. This feature enables you to guide Performance Max to reach new audiences and niches, bridging gaps in your marketing strategy and expanding your reach across various channels, including Search. [source]

The "Search Themes" beta in Performance Max provides an exciting opportunity for advertisers to couple their business knowledge with Google's AI. By manually adding search themes, you can direct the AI to focus on areas of your business that might need to be fully captured through assets, feeds, and landing pages alone.

This becomes particularly useful when:

• You think your landing pages need more complete details.
• You've expanded into a new market or launched a new product.
• You need an extensive performance history to run seasonal promotions.
• You want comprehensive coverage of essential business themes.

In practical terms, you're promoting a museum with an outdoor area for kids. You might need more resources to create landing pages for every feature of your museum, potentially missing out on search queries that would otherwise be relevant.

By adding search themes like "activities for children" or "outdoor recreation," you guide Google’s AI to target users interested in those areas across channels like Search, YouTube, Gmail, and more.

Go Deeper

Here’s how it works:

• Search themes let you indicate queries you know your customers are looking for. They are optional and are additive to what queries Performance Max would match you to using your URLs, assets, and more.
• You can add up to 25 search themes per asset group.
• Search themes will respect brand exclusions in Performance Max and account-level negative keywords.
• Results driven from search themes will bring your customers to the landing pages you’ve indicated via your Final URL expansion, page feeds, and URL contains settings.
• Search themes will have the same prioritization as your phrase match and broad match keywords in your Search campaigns.
• You’ll be able to see the search categories that your ads matched to in your search terms insights at both the campaign and account levels, and associated conversion performance. You can now view search term insights for custom date ranges, download your data, and access it via the API.

In early 2024, we’ll automatically upgrade your existing custom segments based on search activity to search themes. With the release of search themes, you will no longer be able to add or edit custom segments based on past search activity in Performance Max. Custom segments based on interests will still be available. Learn more here.

[source]

Share your opinion

From Alex van de Pol’s LinkedIn post:

Although I have not had the chance to use this beta feature myself I see some potential pros and cons: 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐬: - Potential to access new traffic areas by communicating more business specifics to Google AI. - Flexibility to adjust campaign focus when entering new markets or launching new products/services. - May provide a workaround for landing pages that aren't updated frequently. 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐬: - Being in beta, the feature may have unforeseen bugs or inconsistencies. - The effectiveness heavily relies on Google AI’s understanding and interpretation, which might not always align with advertisers’ intentions. - It leads to (even more) lack of control and transparency on how and where ads are placed, amidst the black box of Google's algorithm.

From Navah Hopkins’s LinkedIn post:

A few things to note: 1. Search themes have a certain degree of "exact" to them. If you bid on phrase or broad match keywords that could match, but the search theme is exactly what the user searched...the search theme will win! Exact search keywords would still win over PMax/Search Themes. 2. While search themes allowed for 10 in the beta, Google is allowing for up to 25 in the full roll out. These are "or" statements which means they represent purely additional traffic if you add them in. 3. This innovation in combination with the more direct negative keyword, placement, and topic controls are huge wins for PMax. Yes, the wish list is still there for transparency in reporting and being able to weight certain channels more highly. However it's worth taking a step back and appreciating the tools we are being given. 4. The examples highlighted are absolutely signaling the work Google's put in to make PMax work for lead gen. I don't know if this will be enough to win over the skeptics, but I do think it will help those who've been trying to make PMax work for them see meaningful improvements.

From Thomas Eccel’s LinkedIn post:

It is really important for your Pmax Performance that you understand how those search-themes work. To start with: Pmax Search Themes work for now ONLY for Google Search, so you can still go on with Custom Segment (search terms) targeting. (likely to be expanded soon to YouTube) Read below in the image how those Search-Themes exactly work. Since they are different to Keywords. And as in one of my older posts, if you dont add search-themes, google will try fo find them for you. I recommend to add them as quickly as possible, since you know best what keywords work for you.

From Miles McNair & Bob Meijer 's PPC Mastery Community :

Setup best practices. And now for the final part of this guide, here are the best practices when you set up Search Themes:

(read their article here)

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