Standard Google Shopping Ad Campaign vs Performance Max for Ecommerce

When it comes to advertising your ecommerce shop via Google Ads, you can use typical campaign types like search, display, and video. These can deliver solid results, but there are additional campaign types you shouldn’t overlook—campaigns that often generate even better performance.

They’re called Google Shopping Ad Campaigns. To use them, you simply need to list your products in Google Merchant Center first and sync it with your Google Ads account.

There are two different types of Shopping Ad Campaigns. The first is now called the Standard Shopping Ad Campaign. This is where your products appear in Google Search results with the product image, title, description, and price.

It works similarly to a dynamic Google Ad campaign because you can’t manually select keywords like in a normal search ad campaign. Instead, Google Ads determines which keywords to target based on the product titles and descriptions in your Google Merchant Center feed.

A useful feature is that you can edit product titles and descriptions in Google Merchant Center without changing them on your website. Standard Shopping Ad Campaigns can be highly profitable for ecommerce stores.

The second type, introduced in recent years, is called Performance Max. Performance Max campaigns have actually become more popular than Standard Shopping Ad Campaigns. They show shopping ads just like standard campaigns but also utilize all of Google’s advertising channels—display, video, search, and more.

Setting up Performance Max campaigns differs from Standard Shopping because you must create Asset Groups including headlines, descriptions, images, and videos. Google combines these assets with your product data from Merchant Center.

You can also provide Performance Max campaigns with Audience Signals to help guide the AI toward your target customers. There’s a section to add keywords, but unlike search ad campaigns, Performance Max uses “search themes.” As Google explains:

“When you add search themes, you’re telling Google AI you want to reach that traffic 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 specifically, search themes in Performance Max campaigns have the same prioritization as phrase match and broad match keywords in Search campaigns. Exact match keywords identical to search queries will still be prioritized over search themes.”

Which Type of Shopping Ad Campaign Is Better?
Generally, Performance Max delivers better results for most advertisers. It doesn’t hurt to test both types, but avoid running them simultaneously for the same products and locations—they could compete against each other and make performance harder to measure.

You can, however, run regular search ad campaigns alongside Shopping campaigns. Google confirms that “Performance Max complements existing Search campaigns and respects your keyword targeting. If a user’s query exactly matches an eligible Search keyword in your account, the Search campaign will take priority over Performance Max.”