When it comes to advertising your ecommerce shop via Google Ads, you can utilize the typical campaign types like search, display & video. These can deliver solid results but there are additional types of campaigns you can set up that can generate even better results and therefore shouldn’t be overlooked.

They’re called Google Shopping Ad Campaigns and to take advantage of these campaign types you simply need to list your products first on Google Merchant Center & sync it with your Google Ads Account.

There are 2 different types of Shopping Ad Campaigns however. The first type is now just called Standard Shopping Ad Campaign. This is where your products are shown in the Google Search Results Page along with the product image, title, description and price.

It’s kind of a like a Google Ad Dynamic Campaign in a way since you can’t add the keywords you want to target for the campaign like you can a normal search ad campaign. Google Ads determines which keywords to advertise your products under by the keywords used in your product title and descriptions inside Google Merchant Center.

It’s important to note that you can change the product titles and descriptions in Google Merchant Center without having to change them on your website which is nice.

Standard Shopping Ad Campaigns can be very profitable for ecommerce shops. 

The 2nd type of shopping ad campaign type that came out in recent years is called Performance Max. Performance Max campaign types have actually become much more popular than the Standard Shopping Ad Campaign type.

It will run ads just like Standard Shopping Ad Campaigns but it also utilizes all of Google Ad’s channels; display, video, search, etc.

Set up of Performance Max campaigns is a little different than Standard Shopping Ad Campaigns because you are required to create Asset Groups that include headlines, descriptions, images, videos, etc. It will combine these assets with what is available for each product in Google Merchant Center.

You can also give Performance Max Campaigns Audience Signals to help guide the campaign to reach your target audience. 

There’s also a section to add keywords but unlike with search ad campaigns, with Performance Max it’s called “search themes” and as Google says, “When you add search themes, you’re telling Google AI you want to reach that traffic in your Performance Max campaign across all Google Ads inventory including Search, YouTube, Gmail, Discover, Maps, and Display. Search themes also help you find audiences across channels based on users’ search behavior.

On Search inventory specifically, search themes in Performance Max campaigns will have the same prioritization as your phrase match and broad match keywords in Search campaigns. Exact match keywords that are identical to the search queries will continue to be prioritized over search themes and other keywords.”

So Which Type of Shopping Ad Campaign Is Better?

In general, I typically see better results using Performance Max. It doesn’t hurt to test both campaign types, just keep in mind that you should not run both at the same time if they’re targeting the same products & locations. They could cannibalize the results you’re seeing in both campaigns and make it difficult to get a good read on which one is performing better.

You can, however, run normal search ad campaigns while running a Shopping Ad Campaign. In fact, Google claims that “Performance Max complements existing Search campaigns and respects your keyword targeting. If the user's query is identical to an eligible Search keyword of any match type in your account, the Search campaign will be prioritized over Performance Max.”