What is Performance Max and should I run it instead of Shopping ads?
The short answer
Performance Max is Google's single automated campaign that runs across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Gmail and Discover, letting AI decide where your budget goes. For a healthy ecommerce PMax campaign, aim for 60-80% of spend landing on Shopping, if Display or YouTube is eating your budget instead, your product feed probably needs work, not your bidding. Most D2C brands should run PMax alongside, not instead of, a smaller standard Shopping campaign to catch what PMax's black box misses.
A quick summary to orient you. The real value is below: the resources worth your time, from people who've actually done it, not us.
Here are the resources
Hand-picked from around the web, each with a note on why it earns your time. India-specific ones carry a badge.
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📄 Article
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Why we picked it
The canonical explanation of what PMax actually optimises (bidding, budget, audiences, creatives, attribution) straight from Google, read this before trusting a blog's interpretation of what the black box is doing.
Why we picked it
A practitioner's honest read on where PMax actually delivers for ecommerce versus where founders overtrust the automation, including the margin-exclusion tactic that measurably lifts ROAS.
Why we picked it
Answers the real operational question once you've outgrown 'just run PMax', how to keep a standard Shopping campaign running productively alongside it instead of letting them cannibalise each other.
Why we picked it
A comprehensive, current Shopping ads reference with real emphasis on feed quality as the foundation, the right depth for a founder setting up their first feed correctly.
