Open a new Google Ads account for a store and Google will steer you toward Performance Max within a few clicks. Its help pages call it the best way to maximize online sales, and for a large store with years of order data, it often is.
A new store doesn't have years of order data. It has a product feed, a purchase tag that was tested last week, and a budget that can't afford to teach an algorithm from scratch. For that store, the first Shopping campaign should be the one where you can still see what's happening and set every bid yourself: Standard Shopping on manual bids.
This chapter makes that case. It covers how Standard Shopping fits the bottom-of-the-funnel launch from earlier chapters, what Shopping ads put in front of a shopper, how Standard Shopping and Performance Max share an auction later, and the two controls that keep a first Shopping campaign tidy: priority and negatives. The examples come from the fly fishing, coffee, cookware and e-bike stores in this guide. Your catalog will differ. The launch order holds.
Google Still Lets Standard Shopping Run on Bids You Type In. Performance Max Doesn't.
Google's own comparison of its two Shopping options is plain about bidding. Standard Shopping offers automated strategies (Target ROAS, Maximize Clicks and Maximize conversion value) and a manual one: Manual CPC. Performance Max bids automatically, with Maximize conversion value or Maximize conversions. There's no manual setting.
Manual CPC bids in Standard Shopping are set per ad group and can be split by product group. You decide what a click on a group of products is worth, and Google won't pay more than that. You can split products into finer groups to give a $1,600 e-bike a different ceiling from a $25 bag of coffee.
That matters most when the account knows nothing yet. Automated bidding learns from conversions. A brand-new account has none, so Google's bidding starts out guessing, and it guesses with your budget. Manual bids let you start from what Chapter 3 told you a click can afford, then adjust as real sales arrive.
Here's that math run backward, as an illustration. Chapter 3's $125 fry pan needed about 4.3 ROAS to break even once shipping, fees and returns were counted. At the same chapter's 1.4% benchmark conversion rate for Shopify stores, a click on that pan is worth about $1.75 in sales ($125 times 0.014). Divide that $1.75 by 4.3 and the pan's click ceiling comes out near 40 cents. That's your starting ceiling for the pan's product group. Your own price, margin and conversion rate will move it, and real orders will tell you which way.
Exact Match and Standard Shopping Both Leave the Bids in Your Hands. That's Why Both Launch First.
A store's account grows from the inside out. The inner ring is the pans, bikes and waders people search for by name, typed the way your buyers type them. The outer ring is everything you haven't found yet, and it only pays to explore once the account has sales to steer by. Our name for the inner-ring campaign is Isolation: you pick the searches, you type in the bids, and nothing else gets in. Later comes Exploration, our name for a broad-match campaign whose bidding works to a target, which finds the long-tail searches no list would include.
For a store, Isolation is two campaigns, not one:
- Exact-match Search on the product and category searches from Chapter 5.
- Standard Shopping on manual bids, with the products you're confident in.
Which products count as confident? Start with the ones that already sell without ads, are in stock in every size and color, and carry a price that holds up next to the rivals you saw in Chapter 5. Leave out items with thin margins, frequent stockouts or a high return rate. Their break-even ROAS is the hardest to reach, and a first campaign shouldn't spend its budget proving that.
Shopping doesn't wait. Shopping goes live on day one, beside the brand campaign. A shopper weighing two pans wants to see both pans and both prices, and a manual Standard Shopping campaign reports the searches that triggered your products (Google hides the very low-volume ones). Broad match, automated bidding and Performance Max wait until the account records about 30 purchases a month, usually a few months in and sooner for busy stores.
Shopping Ads Show the Photo and the Price Before the Click. One Fly Shop Ran at Least 30 Shopping Ads and Just 4 Text Ads.
A text ad has to describe the product. A Shopping ad shows it: the photo, the product title, the price, the store name, and often a star rating. Google places them on the Shopping tab, next to the regular search results, on Google Images and, if you allow it, on partner sites.
The stores we studied lean on them. In Google's Ads Transparency Center over 90 days, Red's Fly Shop had at least 30 product ads running (our pull stopped at 30) and 4 text ads in the same pull. Across the three fly shops, the text ads almost never printed a price: 7 of 71 readable text ads carried a dollar figure, and every one of those was a free-shipping threshold or a discount, not a product price. The prices lived in the Shopping ads, where each product carried its own.
One honest caveat from our research. We collected Google results pages for 40 store searches from three US cities, and the scraping tools couldn't see Shopping ads at all, even on test searches like "running shoes," where a real shopper sees them. So we can't tell you how often Shopping ads appeared on those pages. What we can tell you is what the stores ran, from Google's own ad library.
That also changes where the work goes. A Shopping ad is built from your product feed, not from ad copy you write in the account. The title, photo and price a shopper sees are built from your Merchant Center feed, so a vague title like "Model 3 Pro" loses to one that names the product type, the brand and the key detail. Before you launch, read your top 20 product titles the way a shopper would and fix the ones that don't say what the item is.
When Standard Shopping and Performance Max Carry the Same Products, Ad Rank Decides Which Ad Shows.
Plenty of advice online still says Performance Max automatically beats Standard Shopping on the same products. Google's current help page says otherwise: when both campaigns target the same products, locations, languages and hours, "Ad Rank will determine which campaign serves an ad."
That's good news for the launch order. You can start with Standard Shopping now and add Performance Max later without one campaign shutting the other off. For each search, Google serves whichever campaign has the higher Ad Rank.
Google is clear about which one it prefers. It says advertisers that moved from Standard Shopping to Performance Max saw a 25% average increase in conversion value at a similar ROAS. That's Google's figure from its own 2022-2023 ad data, and by our reading it describes advertisers who had conversion history to bring with them. Chapter 10 covers when Performance Max earns its place in a store's account. The short version: after the orders exist to steer it.
Campaign Priority Lets the Same Product Sit in Two Shopping Campaigns Without Bidding Against Itself.
Standard Shopping has a setting that Search doesn't: campaign priority, set to Low, Medium or High. It only matters when the same product appears in more than one Shopping campaign for the same country, and Google's rules for it are specific:
- The higher-priority campaign's bid is used, even if a lower-priority campaign bids more.
- If the higher-priority campaign runs out of budget, the lower-priority one bids.
- When campaigns share a priority, the higher bid wins.
One common use: put your best sellers in a campaign of their own, with its own budget, so a handful of proven products can't be starved by the rest of the catalog. Keep it simple at launch. One Standard Shopping campaign with sensible product groups is enough for most new stores; priority earns its keep once you have a reason to split.
Shopping Has No Keywords, but It Has Negatives. The Search Terms Report Shows What to Block.
You can't choose which searches a Shopping ad shows for. Google decides from your product data, which is why Chapter 14 spends a whole chapter on the feed. But you can choose which searches it shouldn't show for. Standard Shopping supports campaign-level negative keywords.
That's where the search terms report earns its place. Standard Shopping lists the searches each ad group's products appeared for, so you can see if an e-bike starts showing up for "ebike battery" or a bag of coffee for "coffee shop near me." Block those the way Chapter 5 described: free, used, jobs, rival store names, and anything your products don't answer.
Read the report weekly at first, sorted by cost. A handful of searches usually eats most of the spend. If one of those keeps getting clicks and never orders, block it. If one keeps producing orders, it belongs in your exact-match Search campaign too, where you can write an ad just for it.
That visibility is why we treat Standard Shopping as the store's listening post in month one. The searches it reports feed the exact-match keyword list, the negative list and, later, the targets you'll hand to automated bidding.
Next: Value Bidding Waits Until the Orders Can Teach It.
Manual bids get the account to its first orders. Chapter 7 covers how to set those bids, when to move to Maximize conversion value and a ROAS target, and why a $101 pan and an $855 set shouldn't be bid on as equals.
Earlier chapters cover keyword research seeded with the brands you carry and why category pages win the auction. Every chapter is on the guide's home page.
When we launch a store through Google Ads management, the first Shopping campaign is Standard Shopping with the proven products and hand-set bids. Doing it yourself? Check your account for a Performance Max campaign that launched before you had 30 sales a month, and look at what it can and can't show you.
