Mastering Seasonal Marketing in 2025 | What Big Brands Do for Seasonal Sales

Speaker A: Are the number six globally in the top 50 most influential PTC people.

Speaker B: And we're indexing on brand terms and over indexing and remarketing, still testing it and experimenting it and trying to find success.

Speaker A: Hi Greg, welcome to the 10X Marketer podcast. How are you today? Why don't you introduce yourself and then um, let's get started all.

Speaker B: Ah right. I am doing fantastic today. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here on the show. I appreciate it. Uh, my name is Greg Finn. I am the head of performance at site Cypress North. We're sort of a boutique performance marketing agency where we really kind of lean in on E commerce and lead gen and um, started it. We're in our 15th year and I am the one that makes sure we get the results is I guess the easiest way to describe that.

Speaker A: Awesome. So I think you have been quite humble because you are the number six globally in the top 50 most influential PPC people. And you also have been writing for Search Engine Land and you have almost contributed 700 plus articles. So that's load of articles. And um, since you have written it before AI, I think that takes a lot of hard work these days. Anybody can produce 700 articles but doing it before AI is a lot of work.

Speaker B: Yes. And even my BL, even my post today that I put out on Cypress north, our company website, I use 0AI. I go in, you can read it. It's like I'm talking so people know that it's not really AI. And I'm assuming we're going to get to that a little bit more.

Speaker A: Yeah, 700 articles. You get into that practice of writing your. So it's hard to go. Even if you have tools, you'll still feel good at writing yourself. So that's good habit to have. Now let's talk about what is happening because of AI. You turned yourself from a PMAX hater to somebody who have been recommending pmax. Let's start from there. What changed your opinion? And then we'll go deeper into how to use pmax and what are the tips that you want to give to people? We'll go one by one. Yeah.

Speaker B: And so these days I'm mainly on the ad side. I'd say I still oversee some organic stuff. Um, but Performance Max or pmax, um, which was sort of like Google's kind of like flagship effort at um, almost like a one stop shop campaign that goes out across at least initially Google owned and operated properties and search. Um, when it launched it was not near the product that it is today. Right. And I think, I think one sign of being a good marketer in general is being able to change your, your tune on certain things when, um, when things are improved. Also the ability, even when it launched and it didn't have a lot of robust features and was over indexing on brand terms and over indexing and remarketing, still testing it and experimenting it and trying to find success. And I feel like I've been very, at least vocal about that, that whenever something new is launched, a tool, you know, it's a tool that could be used the wrong way or the right way. If I take a hammer and I try to smash a screw into a piece of wood, it's not going to work. But it doesn't mean the hammer is broken, right? It might mean that, that execution is broken. So, um, with the launch of Performance Max, again everything, there were no brand controls, you didn't have negative terms, you couldn't really see where the spends were going to, um, you couldn't see how assets were performing. It was just really, people called it the black box. Um, and over the years Google has done a very good job of giving more insights back to advertisers that use Performance Max. So you know, we now have, in some accounts we have negative keyword lists already, um, where we have negative keywords. They announced that we'd only have 100, they changed it to 10,000. Um, we can see channel performance, you can see asset performance. And I would just say like Google has done a great job on the ad side to listen to advertisers as of late and really make better changes to their products, um, from that feedback. And the performance max of today is very different from the performance max of before. But even in the before times we will be testing and we will be trying.

Speaker A: Awesome. So let's start with the one fundamental question that almost everywhere I've seen this in forums, talking to people in private, there are clear, uh, two sides when it comes to performance marketing. The B2B side and the B2B B2C side. So if somebody is running, let's say shopping campaign, pmax will give them great results because you are able to input load of data. But there are a lot of agencies that are running pmax for lead gen because they are able to supply the offline conversions. But still there are a lot of others who are not able to do it properly because they don't have a mechanism to supply the offline data or they don't have the right offline conversion tracking in place, where do you stand? Is it going to work in specific campaign type or is it going to work across the campaign if you have the right strategy?

Speaker B: So that's a great question and um, I'm going to break it out into the sort of those two buckets that you talked about at first. So I would say that Performance Max is not our go to for the E Commerce side, let's say or B2C or DTC, whatever you want to call it. Um, and the reason for that I would say is that shopping ads or PLAs as they used to be called are very specific things. Um, and we do use pmax sort of layered on but typically at least this moment, at this time in 2025, we typically build shopping campaigns as our like first and foremost campaign type. And then from that we supplement with Performance Max is needed if a shopping campaign can't keep up. If we're trying to test if we're trying to get better performance, sometimes we'll test that. Um, you can also layer on with shopping um, where maybe you have a catch all campaign for a product level category that's performance Max, um, but then you have more aggressive bids at the shopping level. That's something that was new as of October of 2024. Um, and then also things like sales and you know the kind of like flash sales and stuff like that. Pmax can do a really good job at that. But for the most part shopping ads are like one of the most unique ads I would say because people get to see that price, they get to see that product, they can compare it against a few other things there. So there's a little bit more knowledge I would say that goes into that click than something that's just a text ad or a YouTube ad. Uh M. So on that E Commerce side we do use pmax. It's not our go to. Our go to is still shopping campaigns um, for the most part and everything's nuanced but that's sort I have to give an answer. So that's the answer. And then for the lead gen side a lot of people out there just say that performance Max doesn't work and it does work. Um, I do believe the key is in what was just mentioned is not targeting or not optimizing towards leads per se, but optimizing something that has a higher friction level or is more of a down funnel conversion. So what I mean by that is instead of saying hey, I want this just general form fill filled out. Um, what can happen with Performance Max is that you will See a lot of kind, um, of spam or junk leads coming through and it's, it's not good. Right. And what happens is company, uh, sales team may get distressed, they may be overworked, um, something like that. So um, it can be actually a problem if you're going towards like a lightweight lead where if you have something and you have like well defined life cycle stages and maybe you have a lead, you have a marketing qualified lead that hits like your ideal client profile or icp and then maybe you have a sales qualified lead. Where a sales team comes in is like, yep, this one's a good one. Cool. I'm going to mark this Sales qualified. You want to go towards that sales qualified lead type or even mql but you don't want to go towards just people filling out a form or it's really not going to work. And you can do um, conversion imports, you can get a CRM and hook it up to Google Ads like a HubSpot or you know, something even simpler. Um, but really sending the right signals and sending the more detailed signal towards that person that could be eligible for that actual sale is the way to go.

Speaker A: So let's say the next part. Uh, you have been saying that Google still had load of opportunity to maybe add more data or make it available for users to see. Right now you're seeing some 10,000 negative keywords, channel data and there are a lot of other data variables that Google have made available for people. Uh, is there any other scope of improvement to make PMAX better? Maybe we can discuss uh, that also if you want.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I think just in general some of the negative keywords, I completely understand what Google is saying when initially they said there's no negative keywords or there's just account level negative keywords which was like the next step and then, oh, we only have a hundred. Because with Performance Max, the thing that's really hard to wrap your mind around and it's the same way with Broad Match and AI Max, um, is that you are not buying that search query, you're just not with pmax it's intent and with Broad Match it looks at what's on your landing page and it looks at that keyword, but it also looks at past search queries. Right. So you have those three things and when you're looking at a past search query, Google is smart enough to know that somebody may have done a very, you know, commerce driven search in the field that you're in and then the secondary search that you're actually showing up for that. That query might not be like a perfect match, but the intent is there. And so I think that's something that people are doing kind of wrong with. Performance Max is thinking about it like it's just any other campaign and putting in all the same negatives and all the same things. Yes. If you sell something that is all new products, you probably want to negate used. Right. Like that's probably something you don't want to show up for and you don't want to pay for. Um, but people can get a little bit too wild, I'd say, with some of the negatives because you need to know that it's not as much query based as it is intent based. This is very much so keywordless technology. And it does, it is a problem where, you know, all of a sudden people are treating it like it's keyword driven. It's just not, it's not, not the same thing.

Speaker A: Yeah, um, old habit. Uh, stays there. Just like the one we were talking about, you writing everything. Uh, because we have been so like so familiar with the keywords when it comes to Google Ads. It's like hard to go by right, uh, now.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: I think.

Speaker B: Oh, sorry. Just one other point. Uh, I think if you've you know, been involved and you, let's say you're setting up your first PMAX campaign, I think it's like almost more similar to Meta in a way where it is, you know, you're going after these, these people, these interests, these again, this like the context. Um, and so for me, I think trying to look at it that way and less about search is really the way to go. And then, um, just also I remembered I did not answer your question on how to make PMAX a better. Um, I do think the channel reporting that they've given us is very nice. Um, the one thing I would say Performance Max is there's a lot of different, um, just network types in there. So you have search, you have YouTube, you have display, you have Gmail, you have Discover. We know that a few of those things mainly search. And that includes search ads and shopping ads that will be in there. Those perform better. We just know that for historically it always performs better. Not always. I'm sure there's like a uh, outlier case there, but those perform much better. And I just don't think it's a fair ask when you set up a Performance Max campaign to say I want this return on ad spend back because there's two campaign placements that's ah, both are within search, which is, you know, text ads and shopping ads that perform better. So if I could say um, a change I would do is maybe there's a way to sort of bid adjust some of the other ones down. Because if you're doing performance max, really I think the value is getting this like huge buffet of locations. But some of these locations just can't keep up and I think it makes it drive more towards search and more towards shopping in order to hit those return goals. Where in reality I might say, I just, I know that Gmail isn't going to be the biggest thing out there. So its return on ad spend could be half of what it gets from search and then we'd actually see more impressions going towards Gmail and I think you'd be able to use it to kind of get a better purview of all the different placements.

Speaker A: Understood. So let's understand the other part. This is what we are expecting from Google right now, what you as a user do better in order to teach your performance max campaign or maybe ensure that the learning is in the right way and it is able to allocate the budgets properly. And since you don't have many levers, the chances of it going haywire is very high. What are the levers that you can have and control uh, while you're running a PMAX campaign?

Speaker B: So you don't get much so you sort of have to make them and I'm going to explain that in a minute here. But you know you have like your asset groups and you can put in some search themes or you know, any of those, um, audience signals is what they're called. Um, and those are okay, you know, like we have a debate internally as to how actually impactful some of those are. And one thing that we do is we try to keep the signals to a minimum is what we're putting in. And what I mean by that is uh, we will make multiple pmax campaigns. It's not the way you're supposed to do it, it's not the way Google tells you to do it. But I'll make a campaign with the same exact creative in there and one will have an audience signal of saying maybe there's search themes and we put in keywords that might be close but are very, very um, you know, dialed in together. So they're all very similar. And instead of making another asset group in there, I make another campaign. So now I have the same cloned performance max campaign, all the same creative. And then I might put in my competitors URLs and say if you've been on sites like this, you're going to see the same ads and then I'll do the same thing again and I'll maybe use a customer match list. And now we're matching off of customers that we've seen in the past. And then I might go do one and do somebody that's in market. So all of a sudden it's this four different campaigns, four different budgets, um, and we can then see that which one is working better. And then you're kind of making your own lever. Right. Where I can say, oh, this one that's our customer match, um, isn't working that well. But the one that we're targeting our competitor is, okay, I'm going to raise our ask a little bit for our bid and I'm going to give it more budget because that one's working. So I think some ways when Google doesn't give you a lot of, you know, options, um, there you kind of just need to make your own. And again, this is not what Google ever recommends, but it's what works for us in many cases.

Speaker A: I'm planning to put this on YouTube. I hope Google doesn't uh, restrict this.

Speaker B: They won't. They'll love it.

Speaker A: All right. So I hope it doesn't happen because uh, maybe they'll strike my channel for doing this. Let's understand the other part of uh, Performance Max Journey where people have complained about uh, layering it with the remarketing campaigns. So all the remarketing that you used to do before PMAX and after pmax, what is the change and ah, what is the right strategies to club remarketing with pmax.

Speaker B: Yeah, so that is something again in the early days was really, really difficult. Over index on brand as I mentioned, over index on remarketing. Um, there are new options out there like bidding for new customer acquisition. Maggie from our team just put out a great article over on Search Engine Land showing how bidding for new customers and bidding for new high value customers work really well. Um, I would just say one of the caveats is a lot of times when you set something up like um, new customer acquisition, if you are in a B2B space, it may not work as well based on the way that your list matches. Right. And if you are dealing with people that are typically using Google or operating on their work machines with a different email than what their Gmail is, it may not work as well. Um, but really trying to use some of that new customer acquisition can help to limit some of that Remarketing, um, but there will be remarketing out there. It's just part of what it is. Um, the nice thing is if you want to now with the channel reporting, you can go through and remove that if you wanted to and just say, here's everything that does not include display. Obviously there'll still be some remarketing on search ads or RL says there'll still be some Gmail. Um, but that's just sort of part of it. And I would say the new customer acquisition is not perfect, but it's a step, right? It's a tool, it's a lever that we have that we didn't have earlier. So I would say new customer acquisition would be the way to go. Make sure that you're getting those lists updated regularly, if not daily. And that can help you find people that aren't current customers at least, um, to bring aboard.

Speaker A: Awesome. And see, I was reading it somewhere. So I'm changing the gear to, from PMAX to AI now because everyone's favorite topic is AI these days. I was reading somewhere where you wrote that AI as, ah, a tool can make things worse if starts doing everything for marketing. So I didn't really understand, uh, the entire context of this statement, uh, because, uh, you can explain it better.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, I love AI. I use it every day. I do not think it is a replacement for using your brain to think. Right. Like, I know Mark Zuckerberg came out last month and is like, soon you will just be able to give a budget to Facebook and they will be able to do everything for you. And I think of that and that sounds like a living nightmare to me. I do not want Mark Zuckerberg. I don't want to just give him my money and have him do something. We see this all the time with Google and smart bidding, right? Like CPCS go up because we allow Google to set the bids. Then your competitor allows Google to set the bids and all of a sudden the bids keep going up and the CPCS keep going up. And look at it, uh, just Q2, Google revenue that was announced today while we're recording, uh, is 14 increase.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think, um, half of the world has already been doing that. Right. People don't know how to use meta ads and they just keep m boosting. So they are already feeling, uh, juxtapockets in a way. Right. They don't understand what results they're getting. They're just paying money.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I think too that a lot of people downplay the quality of things. Right. And and it's like, okay, I need to get a blog post up. I'm gonna go do it with AI. Odds are it is not going. If you are an expert or if you actually have something to say that is not going to be as good as what you could do with your actual brain. I know it's faster. Maybe you can use it for an outline, maybe you can use it for research, maybe you can use it for some topic generation. But really what people care about is. And um, I think this is going to be like the currency in the coming few years is authenticity. Right. Like when you go onto the LinkedIn, you see these massive posts that you look at it and it's like, this is AI. I can see it's emoji, emoji, emoji. And you look at it. I'm m not going to read this because you didn't write this. This is. I don't care what this computer thinks about whatever. And then like when I put out LinkedIn posts, I'll misspell some of the first things so people know that I wrote it. I write things quick and like I'm talking about it. I don't write things like, you know, cross synergistic, you know, applications of mix. Like, I don't talk like that. Um, and I think, you know, and I started making videos. People know that it's actually me doing it like and it's worked really well. Um, and I think there's going to be, I think there A is and B will be big burnout on all this AI generated slop. I mean you see people just putting up blog posts and their images are all broken and it's just, they just checked a box with it. So, you know, here, since like even all the AI stuff has really blown up, we have invested in a full design department within our market marketing team. We hired another designer on top of that. We just interviewed somebody today for the content side when nobody's hiring content. Um, you know, if people are leaning into this okay style of marketing, I'm going to lean into the great style of marketing and be the best. And I think that is just my mindset where I say it. I think it limits people. Right. Because if you go out and you write a blog post only using Chat GPT and you put in all your prompts and you're super pumped about it and you just make a quick image with Chat GPT, it's not going to be the best you could do.

Speaker A: Yep.

Speaker B: It's just not. It's not. And people will know this. People aren't stupid. And so I think people look at it as a lot of replacement for the important things. And I think it is an assistance for the important things, not a replacement.

Speaker A: I true, I like the second part. They are more like an assistant than a replacement but still people have to learn AI because that is important for them.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Like I said I've got all these different prompts I use all the time. I use chat GPT. I was using a 4am this morning when I couldn't sleep. I was just looking up stuff and doing things like, and then coming up with like I, I use it all the time. But you need to have your own unique spin, you need to have your own unique voice and you need to be authentic. And I think that's the one thing that AI is not there yet on is authenticity. And frankly I'm scared for the day that it does become like an authentic human because. And it'll be here but hopefully like 10 years away.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think so. Now let's understand something that is more, more like a personal and if you can, if you want to avoid answering this question you can. Is there any real impact in all the retainers that you had before AI? Are ah there customers who are asking for uh, maybe cheaper services because you're using AI tools or other people who are going and saying that we'll do it myself because now we have all the AI tools to do the work that you have been doing.

Speaker B: No, um, it m has not been the case for us. Um, I would say that we generally lean and skew higher like more medium sized to enterprise size business. Um but honestly like it's something that we're positioning ourselves that we are not that and if you want that we're not that agency for you. We um, care deeply about the results that we bring for people. We act as an extension of the team. If you ever need anything, you slack us teams us, whatever us. Um and so honestly like you would think that that might be the case but we again tend to lean into that performance side of things that's generally more important for companies and harder to do. So for us um, it's there has been zero impact um, across the board out and to be fair we're probably 75% of our business is on the ad side. So I'd assume that if you're on the organic side or SEO side that's going to be a bigger hit with people just not really caring about the quality of their content and being able to leverage AI to create their stuff. Um, I think they'll pay for it later but it's short term win for them now. So I understand that's the case. It just hasn't been it for us.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think more or less same has been the case for me also. We have almost uh, I think 75 invoices going on a retainer and there has been only one or two requests where people said now they are using AI tools so maybe you can reduce the price of content somehow. That was the only request we got. Otherwise uh, they have been with us for quite uh, long time and I don't think there's a lot of noise from people saying that they're losing customer because of AI or maybe not getting new customers. They need to focus on improving the quality maybe rather than finding the excuse of AI.

Speaker B: Yeah. And that's a testament to you, you know that people um, and I think that's something that people overlook. Right. Is like are you trustworthy? Do your clients or do your, if you're in house, do your superiors know that you are giving it your all and you're doing every single thing and you're trying and you're experimenting and you are um, really going above and beyond for them. You know like I think that's one thing where that open line of communication to people and like, hey, I understand you want to do all your posts with AI. Uh, if that's the course you want to go, fantastic. But please know that this is not something that is you know, approved or highly uh, looked. Looked at highly by Google. They're actually saying the opposite of it. And so even if you have some quick wins now, you know, like I think just having that conversation is important and then the relationship side of things is important because yes, you know, things change quick and in the coming years when there's then a core update that's aimed at AI, people are going to suffer.

Speaker A: Yeah. And see the other aspect of this is uh, your relationship and communication is more important. And maybe there are people who are expecting you to do better jobs with all the help that you get from the AI tools. So that expectation is fair to have as a customer. And uh, I don't mind if my customer come and says that uh, you can improve this. You have a lot of tools to analyze XYZ because of AI. I would happily do that for them. That's the communication and relationship management.

Speaker B: Yeah. And really it should, it should save a little bit of time for us at agencies from again like the research and running through and doing A competitive analysis and looking at the, you know, benefit propositions, having AI do some of that from the research side of things. Um, but it's still a lot of work and you know, hopefully AI, uh will just allow the content or that's made to just be better, but not, you know, but the fear is that if you just allow it to do, to do it itself, that is going to be worse and that nobody wants that. Right. It's like, how do you use it and how do you make better stuff even if it's the same amount of hours for you just because you've got some research helper there. But, um, you know, I look at it like, yeah, we can use this to make better stuff so that we have great content so that AI can just steal it again and put it in the AI overviews.

Speaker A: Understood. Um, so now let's talk about one more aspect of AI being everywhere. How is it going to impact Google as uh, a search engine? And uh, is there any real challenge to the dominance that we have been seeing in last 15 years?

Speaker B: Uh, I mean 100%. This is, I've been doing this since 2004. This is the biggest change I've ever seen or competition. And you know, since Google has, has sort of been the leader, um, it is monumental. The biggest change, um, is Google will not be Google the way that people see it today. Um, Liz Reed from Google came out and said the AI mode is the future of Google search. So AI mode, it may not be two years, it may not be four years, but within six years, Google's AI mode, that's what it's going to be.

Speaker A: What will happen to all the uh, organic content writers because you will not get anyone to read your article on your website. Maybe it will go in AI mode and people will end up reading there.

Speaker B: It's going to be a tough time. It's going to be a. I don't know how publishers are going to do well.

Speaker A: I mean, what is the incentive for writing content if nobody's coming on your website?

Speaker B: Well, I, I think they're like some of the stuff that we see today. I think, I think everything will be morphed in a way. Right? And I think a lot of, at least the AI overviews and some AI mode has links, some other just it's a lot of links back to Google and back to Google business profiles. I'm just keeping it in the ecosystem. I, um, mean if these generative engines want to actually have content to answer questions and to have a stable ecosystem, they're Going to have to figure out a way to send more, more traffic back to publishers. Like the way that it is today is just not cutting it. Um, and I think that they'll see that because if people are writing content and if people are getting no traffic, but then these engines need that content to be able to answer questions and all of a sudden people stop writing and they don't have content and then everything becomes worse. So I think that I, at least I hope that there will be some improvements in at least the generation of traffic off of these platforms. Um, just because a. I think that is actually what people want. I think searchers want a little description but they want to be, make it easy and have a link that they can go find more. And I don't think things are looked at nearly enough for what the searcher wants. And I do think that people still want to get to websites in order to do something. Nobody wants to just be on Google all day that nobody wants it. Um, so I think there'll be some changes there. Like this is still very early, um, you know, in at least uh, you know like AI mode and even AI overviews. But that's my hope at least is that they'll understand without websites what are we doing here?

Speaker A: Yeah, so maybe uh, it'll be much worse impact if there's a change in habit. So if I am reading something and I don't want to go on the website then it would be a little difficult time even for Google. But if people carry the habit that they have now which is going to a blue uh, link and reading stuff then we are safe.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I think, I think honestly like it has to still, you still have to drive traffic. Right. I think the thing that we saw a lot of recently is just like a lot of impressions still being there but clicks going down with that great decoupling, um, you know from uh, search console. At least a lot of those clicks that can be answered generatively. Like some of those questions that are simple and, and are like factual questions like those you're not going to be getting traffic from those. Right. Like those are, that's gone, that is never going to come back. Um, but if somebody is still looking for the best pair of running shoes, um, they don't just need text. Right. They need the running shoe to be purchased. Um, will that at some point. I know chat GPT said they're gonna have commerce and be able to buy right through there and they're going to take a cut. So ah, that's fantastic. But yeah, yeah There are many queries where people are actually looking for, like something, not just a quick answer, but something. And I think that's where some of these need to get a lot better.

Speaker A: Yeah, but I think the organic traffic per se, the organic traffic will definitely be impacted. It won't be the same way it is now, but let's see how the future holds. Greg, I think we had a great chat today. Uh, do you want to share anything, any tips, any specifics to all the audience before we leave?

Speaker B: Um, no, I just want to say thanks for, for having me. If anybody has any questions, I'm very active on social media. I'm at Greg Finn pretty much everywhere. And if you are interested, we have a new show every week called Marketing o'. Clock. It comes out Monday. We break down all the news. There's lots of laughs and kind of like strategy type things there. So if you, uh, like this, add

Speaker A: that link in the channel description. I mean, in the video description.

Speaker B: More every Monday. Yeah, I just want to say thanks again for having, uh, me on the show.

Speaker A: Thank you. It was a, uh, real pleasure talking to you and thank you so much, guys, for listening to us so far. Make sure you subscribe to the channel and, uh, we keep bringing guests like Greg's to you. Thank you, Greg. And it was a pleasure chatting with you today.

Speaker B: You're very welcome. Pleasure is all mine.