Google is clear about which campaign it wants a store to run. The Shopping help page says "Performance Max campaigns are the best way to maximize your online sales." Google's retail guide to Performance Max reports that advertisers who moved from Standard Shopping to Performance Max saw a 25% average increase in conversion value at a similar ROAS (Google data, 2022-2023).
We add Performance Max for stores too. We just don't add it first. One Performance Max campaign can put a store's products in front of shoppers on seven Google surfaces, from Search and Shopping to YouTube, Discover, Gmail and Maps. Which product, which surface and what bid are its calls, and your orders are what it makes them from. A store with a handful of sales gives it very little to learn from, and it gives you few hand controls while it guesses.
This chapter covers when a store adds Performance Max, how it should bid, and the four settings we check before it spends a dollar: the store's own brand name, where it sends shoppers, negative keywords and video. The examples come from the stores in this guide. Your timing will depend on your order volume. The checks are the same for every store.
Google Calls Performance Max the Best Way to Maximize Online Sales. We Add It Once a Store Makes About 30 Sales a Month.
Our gate is about 30 purchases a month, the same point where Exploration and broad match open in Chapter 7. Stores usually reach it sooner than lead-generation businesses do, because a sale is a cleaner, faster signal than a lead that may or may not close weeks later. A busy store can get there in its first month or two. A slower one may take a season.
Until then, Standard Shopping and exact-match Search do the work. They show you every search term and let you set every bid, which is what a new account needs. Performance Max shows you less and decides more.
When Performance Max does arrive, it doesn't replace Standard Shopping on day one. Chapter 6 covered Google's rule for two campaigns carrying the same products: Ad Rank decides which ad serves. Google also notes that Performance Max may serve less on Shopping when other campaigns are already showing those products. Running both for a while lets you compare them on the same orders before you shift budget.
About that 25% figure: it comes from Google's own advertisers, measured on its own data, and we'd expect most of those advertisers had order history to bring with them. It's a reason to test Performance Max once you have orders, not a reason to start with it.
One Performance Max Campaign Holds One ROAS Target. Products With Very Different Margins Need Their Own Campaign.
For a store, Performance Max bids on order value, not order count. That follows the same order as Chapter 7: start on Maximize conversion value, then add a ROAS target once a few weeks of values show where the campaign's real return sits, and keep that target above your break-even.
Google generally prefers fewer, bigger campaigns. Its retail guidance says its AI "works best when it can optimize performance across channels using a unified budget." But the same guidance names the cases for splitting: separate campaigns for "different countries and/or languages," or for "different budgets or ROAS targets."
That second case is common for stores. A cookware brand might earn a healthy margin on its sets and a thin one on single replacement lids. One campaign means one target for both, and a target set for the sets would overspend on the lids. Two campaigns, each with a target that fits its margin, keep both profitable.
The way to split is product groups built from your feed. Each Performance Max asset group can have up to 1,000 listing groups, though Google says that many isn't a best practice and points to custom labels instead. Tag products in Merchant Center as high, mid or low margin, then build campaigns on those labels. It's the same tagging Chapter 7 suggested for manual Shopping bids.
Shoppers Who Type Your Store's Name Were Already Coming. Brand Exclusions Stop Performance Max From Taking the Credit.
Someone who searches for your store by name has usually decided to buy from you. Chapter 2 found that at 11 of the 12 stores we studied, the store's own name was under 7% of the search volume Keyword Planner returned for its site. They're a small slice, but they're among the easiest sales an account will ever record.
Left alone, Performance Max can serve on those searches and count those sales as its own. Those orders then sit in the campaign's numbers as if Performance Max had found the shopper, and in our view its bidding then leans toward more people who already knew the store.
Brand exclusions fix that. Google says that for Performance Max, brand exclusions "apply to only Search, Shopping, and YouTube search inventory, but you also have the option to allow your Shopping ads to appear in searches for excluded brands." Its label: "Allow Shopping ads on searches that mention excluded brands."
We exclude the store's brand and tick that box. A shopper searching the store's name still sees its product ads with photos and prices, while the text ad for the brand comes from a brand Search campaign the store controls, with its own small budget and its own report. Chapter 12 covers that campaign.
Final URL Expansion Starts Switched On. It Can Send a Shopper to a Page You Never Picked.
Every new Performance Max campaign starts with Final URL expansion on, by Google's own account. That setting lets a click on a store's ad land on any page Google judges a better fit, even a page that has no product on it at all.
For a store, that can mean a click landing on a blog post, a careers page, a help center article or the returns policy. Picture a cookware shopper who clicks an ad for a carbon steel pan and lands on the store's seasoning guide. The guide is useful, but there's no add-to-cart button on it, and the shopper has to find the pan again on their own.
Google says the feature can lift results; it cites gains of "over 9%" in conversions or conversion value. That's Google's number, and it's an average across many advertisers.
You have three options:
- Turn it off. Google says ads then go "only to the Final URL in addition to product URLs from Merchant Center that are included in listing groups." For most stores at launch, that's the right call.
- Leave it on with exclusions. Google only lets you add URL exclusions while the feature is on. Exclude the blog, careers, help and policy pages at a minimum.
- Use a page feed. A list of approved URLs keeps expansion inside pages you've chosen.
We start stores with it off. If you test it later, check the landing pages report weekly to see where the clicks actually went.
Performance Max Now Takes Up to 10,000 Negative Keywords. They Block Search and Shopping, Not YouTube or Display.
For years, Performance Max offered store owners few ways to add negative keywords. That has changed. Google now says "you can apply a maximum of 10,000 negative keywords to a Performance Max campaign" and that they "apply to Search and Shopping inventory." Shared negative keyword lists work too. Your negative list from Chapter 5 can go straight in: free, used, jobs, rival store names.
What negatives can't do is touch YouTube, Display or Gmail. Those placements follow the campaign's assets and audiences, and Google says you can't manually pause channels like YouTube inside Performance Max.
Two reports make up some of the difference:
- Search terms. Performance Max now has a search terms report, with an "Ad format" segment that splits Shopping ads from text ads.
- Channel performance. Performance Max now has a channel performance page, broken out by Google surface. For a store, the useful part is its "Ads using product data" segment, which shows where the product ads actually ran.
One more rule protects the work from earlier chapters. Google says "Search campaigns containing an exact match keyword are prioritized to serve over Performance Max." Google adds one catch. Google's exception is a Search campaign held back by its budget: then Performance Max can sometimes take a search that matches one of the store's exact keywords. A store's exact keyword campaign from Chapter 5 needs enough daily budget to hold them.
If You Don't Upload a Video, Performance Max Builds One From Your Images and Text.
Performance Max can show on YouTube, and it will find something to show there. Google says auto-generated video ads "are created automatically by Google AI when you don't have active, user uploaded videos" in your asset groups, using your existing images and text. Upload your own videos and, Google says, the system turns auto-generated ones off.
Google's help page on showing products in video ads names the risk: auto-generated videos "may show customers who visit your landing page a different product than the one featured in your video." For a store, that's a shopper who clicks a video of one pan and lands on a page for another.
A real video doesn't have to be expensive. A 15- to 30-second clip of the product in use, shot on a phone in good light, beats one Google assembles from still images, in our experience. Chapter 11 covers YouTube in more detail.
Next: Demand Gen Needs About 50 Conversions in 35 Days Before It Can Bid on ROAS. Run Search and Shopping First.
Performance Max is the first campaign that reaches shoppers who weren't searching yet. Chapter 11 covers Demand Gen and YouTube, which go further up the funnel and need even more order data before they can bid on value.
Earlier chapters cover the settings to check before launch and ad copy from customer reviews. Every chapter is on the guide's home page.
When we add Performance Max for a store through Google Ads management, the brand exclusion, the URL settings and a real video are in place before it goes live. Doing it yourself? Open your Performance Max campaign's settings and check whether Final URL expansion is still on.
