Should you use PMax or Shopping Campaigns [Updated for 2026]

When it comes to seeing the best results possible for your e-commerce brand on Google Ads, there is still an ongoing debate of whether you should be using Shopping campaigns or Performance Max campaigns. And on both sides of this debate, there are super loud voices that proclaim that their way is the only correct way. So you have some people who are screaming that you should never trust Performance Max or Google, and then you have the other people who go, you need to embrace the new formats and new bidding options that you've got inside of Google Ads. And that's where Performance Max comes into late for these brands. So that's why in this video I wanted to remove all the confusion so you know whether you should be using Performance Max, shopping campaigns, or a combination of both for your brand in 2026. And I do want to point out right at the start of this video that the viewpoints that I'm going to share with you actually come from data that we've seen in real-life accounts. So they're not just some dogmatic approach that we hold to, because ultimately for me and the team here at Define Digital Academy, what our driving focus is, is that you are seeing more profitable sales in your account. Now, one thing I do want to stress with this video is that if you are just starting out with Google Ads and you're spending underneath $5,000 a month, this is probably not going to be the best video for you. But don't stress, because just a couple of weeks ago I released a video called my 2026 e-com course for Google Ads, and I've put a link in the description below so that you can go off and watch that video. Because in this video, I'm not going to be breaking down the differences between Performance Max and Shopping and how to start off in Google Ads for your brand in 2026. And the reason for that is because this video is really, really focused at brand owners or people who are running Google Ads campaigns and you're already seeing a level of success. But now one thing that we do know with Google Ads in e-commerce is that once you've overcome those initial hurdles, you do start to get stuck at another point. And that happens somewhere between that $5,000 a month through that $20,000 a month spend. And that's where a lot of brand owners start guessing of whether I should be using Shopping or whether I should be using Performance Max. So when it comes back to that question of whether you should be using shopping or Performance Max campaigns for your brand in 2026? It really comes down to 3 core considerations that we're going to be breaking down in this video. And let's start with the most important one, which is what are your current results inside of Google Ads with your shopping campaigns or your Performance Max campaigns? Now, the reason for why I asked this question right at the start, and why is the most important question that you need to ask about this great debate of whether it's shopping or Performance Max, because ultimately for me, I don't really care whether you use shopping or you Performance Max. I'm not dogmatic about either approach, and this is where I think some people do fall down. They get so stuck on an approach and they lose sight of the main goal of why we're running Google Ads in the first place, and that is to get more sales for your products. So whether that comes through a combination of Search and Shopping, or whether that comes through an account structure where you're pretty much all focused on Performance Max, or whether you're running all three different types of campaigns, ultimately for me it's all about the effectiveness and the efficiency of those campaigns for your brand. So let's just firstly overcome that first hurdle. And the reason for why I say that is because inside of one of our programs at Defined Digital Academy, which is called Google Ads Mastery, we run weekly live coaching sessions. And a common question we do get, especially when we have those e-commerce-focused sessions, is that people ask, should I use Shopping or should I use Performance Max? And one of the examples was there was a member who was thinking about turning off their Performance Max campaigns because a well-respected person in the industry said that they should be using Shopping For me, that's just a really, really small-minded approach because ultimately from what we're seeing, and this is looking at data points, as I said, from hundreds of accounts, we've got some e-commerce brands that's still very, very much focused on search campaigns and shopping campaigns and they don't have any Performance Max running. Whereas we've got other brands that have very, very little search and shopping and 90% of the spend is on Performance Max. Remembering what it comes down to, as I said at the top of this video, it really comes down to What are the current results you're seeing inside of Google Ads? So the first thing that I really, really want to focus on with this whole argument or this whole discussion of whether you should be using Shopping or Performance Max, make sure that you don't lose sight of the core goal of Google Ads. Ultimately, for your business, you want to get more sales. And for me, I don't really care what campaign type drives that. I just want to make sure that we're getting you and your brand and your business more profitable sales inside of Google Ads. So remember, that's the core focus point that we want to be focusing on for this whole discussion as we go through these two next important points. We're going to get really, really practical for you. I'm going to jump into some screen shares as well very, very soon. But before we do that, if you are an e-commerce brand owner and you do find yourself that you are getting stuck and you can't profitably scale your business any further and you would like some extra support, but you would also like to still maintain control of your Google Ads spend to grow your own business. And that is something that we are fully supportive of here at Define Digital Academy. And that's why we started our on-demand program. And our on-demand program is a done-with-you management model. And what that means is that we are your strategic advisors and coaches, but you are still controlling your Google Ads account. The way that we do that, we do a full audit. We also offer you private one-on-one coaching calls, and you also get your own dedicated Slack channel to me and your assigned coaches. So we're able to give you step-by-step support telling you exactly what you need to do so that you can grow your brand as fast as possible. And if you'd like to get to that next level of profitability for your e-commerce brand, why don't you follow that link in the description below and apply for On Demand right now. Now let's move to the next two important questions when it comes to should you be using Performance Max or Shopping campaigns for your business in 2026. Now this is a question which I would ask, and it's the same question whether you're running Shopping or whether you're running Performance Max inside of your current Google Ads campaign setup. And the question is, can you still profitably scale your spend in either your shopping campaign or your Performance Max campaign. Remember how I said before that most e-commerce brands, there's a couple of levels that you need to go to in order to really scale your business. That first level, you just need to be able to get some conversions in your campaigns. But after you get that, so after you solve those first problems of that you can target the right traffic and you can run ads, you can send people to your website and they jump on and they buy your products, and then there's that next level. It's somewhere between, as I said, that $5,000 to $20,000 a month in spend where brands do get a little stuck. And what they do start to notice when they increase their budget, they're not seeing the same levels of profitability. So for example, they may have started their spend at $1,000 a month and they were able to scale up to maybe even $6,000, $7,000, or $8,000 a month. But at that $10,000 a month mark in ad spend, they just find that as they increase their budget further, their actual level of profitability goes down. So they don't want to scale or add any more extra budgets to Google Ads, which is the right decision to make because you need to solve this problem before you start just throwing more money at Google. And what we generally generally find in this situation, if there is an e-commerce brand and they are running a lot of shopping campaigns, they may have some search in there. And when they start to add in more and more budget, if they start to see their profitability drop down, it's generally because they're facing what's called CPC resistance. When I talk about CPC resistance, this means that as you increase your budget, your CPCs start to skyrocket. And the reason for why this is happening is because With Search and Shopping campaigns, you're targeting mainly the bottom of the funnel traffic, and there's just not enough conversions to go around for everyone who is bidding on those products. A telltale sign of this happening: you increase your budget by 20% and then you start to see your CPC skyrocket by 30% or 40%. While if you're focused more on Performance Max campaigns and you start to increase your budget more and more, you will start to see your ROAS decline. But the main driver here, when you dive into where Google is spending the money inside of Performance Max, it's focusing only on a couple of products or a couple of locations, and then it starts to test in different areas. When you check your channel performance, you start to see Discovery and YouTube and all these things start to spike. And essentially what happens is Performance Max starts to get stuck and is just focusing 80% of your budget sometimes on 3 or 4 or 5 different products. This is a common problem that we do also see inside of Performance Max. Now I've already explained why that happens, through the core shopping setup. And that really comes back to that CPC resistance issue. Now, for Performance Max, the reason for why that can happen is you have to remember with Performance Max, it's very much built with smart bidding by default. You've got to choose maximize conversions or maximize conversion value. And what can happen inside of Performance Max if that spend is not spread out across enough search terms or enough product types, it basically starts to focus in on a smaller and smaller pool of searches, and then it can't find enough conversions in there, and then it has to go out and try to test some similar and related themes, and that's where you start to see that ROAS start to drop. Because what Performance Max is trying to do, it's trying to find new conversions, but it just can't go about and do that because there's not enough conversions coming into that campaign. Surprisingly, for both those situations, although one is shopping campaign setup and the other one is a Performance Max campaign setup, the solution is really, really similar. What you need to do, you need to essentially open up new areas for Google to start spending. So let's firstly start if you're focused more on a shopping setup. Dependent on how many SKUs or how many different products you have in your shopping campaign, you need to start looking at where is Google actually going through and spending that money. You may have a bit more of a traditional setup where you may have your shopping campaigns and then you may have ad groups broken out by product categories. And what you might find is that if you've got 6 or 7 or 8, sometimes even 10 different ad groups or different product categories, that Google is focusing that spend on maybe only 2 or 3 of those product categories. Or you could find it in locations. So if you're targeting, say for example, all of the US, you might find that Google is prioritizing only a couple of states when it's coming to its spend. So what you can do there with the shopping campaign setup, you can break out or segment out different campaigns by different product categories or by different locations. So you're forcing Google to spend money in new areas. And the solution is the same for Performance Max as well, where with Performance Max, if you're noticing that spend is going into a couple of asset groups or even to a couple of products within those asset groups, that's when you start to break out new campaigns once again so that you're forcing Google to spend money in new areas. And what you're really looking for there is really focusing money on what we call sort of those sidekick products, so products that have really good conversion metrics but a lower volume of spend. And the core mechanism of what you're doing here— remember that when it comes to Google Ads, budgeting is that the budgets are locked at the campaign level. So what you're doing is you want to break out into new campaigns so you can force more spend. The one thing that I do want to stress here is that more campaigns does not mean better results. So you do need to make sure that you're doing this in a smart way. So that's generally why that when we go through and break out, add in an extra segmentation, we generally only break out sort of one campaign at a time. So for that example, in whether it's Shopping or Performance Max, if say you're a store that has 6 different core product categories and inside your current campaign stack Google is spending on the top 2 product categories, we may break out that 3rd and 4th performing product category into its own campaign with a separate budget so that we can start to supercharge in more spend. So the core principle there is what you want to do is you want to go through have a look at your products, have a look at the search terms, and then look to see whether you need to add in any extra segmentation. Don't just think more campaigns means better results. You do need to also make sure that you've got enough conversion data and enough spend pushing through those campaigns. Now, the third consideration, and this is for people who are using Performance Max, and the third question is, is you want to have a look and see where is Performance Max currently spending your money in regards to different placements. And to make this as practical as possible, let's jump into a screen share. So as I said, if using Performance Max already, the next part of this equation, what you want to go through is you really want to come back and have a look at and go, where is Google currently spending my money? If you are running a shopping campaign format, you know that this is already on the Google Search Network. So shopping will only go through those shopping placement ads. Obviously for Performance Max, it does become a little bit different because Google has the ability to not only spend on those shopping placement ads, it can also spend in general search ads. It can also then spend money across YouTube, the Display Network, also the Discovery Network, and then also in other placements. So what you want to be doing is you want to be looking at and going, all right, where is Google currently spending my money? Because that will then give you some options as to what you should be doing if you want to scale your product spend further. Now, the way that we go through and see this data— so obviously Google released the channel performance reporting throughout 2025. To my knowledge, this is now pretty much available across all of accounts. When it was first launched, it wasn't available across accounts. So you want to go into Insights and Reports. When you're in Insights and Reports, you want to go into Channel Performance. You can see this graph here, but what I really like to look at is I want to come down to this table. And what you're looking at through here is that when you're inside of Google Search, you want to be looking at the differentiation between ads using product data and ads not using product data. So obviously, ads using product data, that means the shopping ads, retail shopping ads. Ads not using product data read that as your traditional search ads. So the other thing that we do, do also go through, you want to make sure that you're not spending, you know, your cost, you're not spending heaps of money on the Discover Network, Gmail, or the Display Network, or even, or you also want to make sure you're not spending too much on search partners or YouTube. So you can see from here that this account over the past 14 days has spent $1,090, and when we saw with Google Search, it's $1,080. So pretty much only $10 hasn't been spent on the Google Search Network. One point I will add here, especially when it comes to Commerce and Performance Max. If you see that you've got over 10%, a lot of times over 5%, spent outside of Google Search, that's when I do start to get a little bit worried about the structure and the setup of your Google Ads account. But what we're going to be looking at in through here is we can see that the vast majority of this spend is getting spent on the Search Network. Only $120 is being spent on Shopping Ads. The rest is being spent inside of actual Google Search placements. So what we would do in this scenario, we would actually look to add it a separate shopping campaign. Now the reason for why this account has done this is because this e-commerce product has a lot of customizations. It's a really, really prime candidate for good results in search. Or the flip side, you can start some search campaigns, which is basically going to force more spend into Performance Max. So there's two ways that you can do that. And then the flip reverse of that is, once again, we are in Insights and Reports, Channel Performance. This is a separate business, and you can see with this one, when we're looking at $12,000 worth of spend, you can see here that, you know, nearly $11,400 has been spent on the Shopping Network inside of Performance Max. So the flip side of this one, what we could do is we could set up a separate search campaign because we know our Performance Max campaigns is pretty much getting spent on the Shopping Network. There is also some extra nuance in here, and what I mean by that is that if you were to throw in an extra, say for example, 20% into the spend, and you're seeing that both amount of money that was being spent on the Shopping Network and the Search Network was increasing at the same level, generally you're also okay with that. You also want to go through and get some extra data about the conversion metrics while setting up a separate search campaign so that you can force Google to spend more money on that network. What I really, really hope that you're seeing throughout this whole video is that it's one of those core functionalities that you see for success with Google Ads is very much being able to pinpoint where is Google spending the money and where are we getting the most success with that money. And if Google is not spending money where we want it to be spent, let's set up some new segmentation or some new campaign types in order to spend more money on those networks. So Search or Shopping or Performance Max that is giving us a better return. When it comes to the question of should you be using Shopping or Performance Max for your e-commerce brand in 2026, please don't get dogmatic or please don't, you know, sort of believe the lie that one is better than the other. It really comes down to what is performing best for your business. Thank you so much for joining me. Now, as I said, if your brand is ready to scale to the next levels in 2026, why don't you follow that link in the description below so you can get some more support from me and my highly expert Google Ads coaches, and you can apply for that on-demand program. Or if you'd like to see some extra free teaching right now on how you can scale your Google Ads spend, and we go through two core concepts, I want you to go through and watch this video right here. Thanks for joining me. See you next time.