Understanding the purpose behind each campaign type and establishing realistic Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) expectations are crucial steps toward maximizing your advertising ROI. The PPC expert Thomas Eccel offered his insights on this topic via his LinkedIn profile. Let’s delve into his analysis.

Search Campaign: The starting point for most advertisers, perfect for high-intent audiences. Search campaigns are the core of Google Ads, showing your product/service when users search for it. CPA is usually at its lowest point. 

Performance Max Campaign: Pmax captures demand and provides big coverage across various Google channels. Good choice if you want to gain additional reach & conversion value beyond keyword-based Search campaigns and you aren’t limited by which channel your ads appear on.

Demand Gen & Video View Campaign (VVC): Here starts the real Demand generation part. These campaigns can help you attract potential customers by showing your creatives or videos across visual and entertaining platforms. Here we are more or less on Meta Ads level. CPA might be 2-5x higher than for your Search Ads.

YouTube Reach Campaign: Video Reach (CPM bidding) campaigns offer a lot of branding possibilities. At this point you reach the highest CPA but also the most available impressions of all Google Ads campaign types.