What is Performance Max and should I run it instead of Shopping ads?
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
