Campaigns and bidding
How to structure Performance Max and Shopping campaigns, steer search, choose a bidding strategy and spread the budget.
Start here
Google Ads Budget: How to Size, Split and Change It
Work out what your store can spend on Google Ads from margin and conversion volume, and see what 1,360 store-months show about ROAS when spend rises.
Google Ads Bidding Strategies: Choose by Monthly Conversions
Find the strategy your Shopping and Performance Max campaigns can carry: under about 30 conversions a month, one campaign without a target, steered by budget.
PMax Keywords: What You Can Still Control in Search
See which search levers Performance Max leaves you and when to block a query: no conversions after spending 2× your CPA makes it a negative keyword candidate.
Performance Max for Ecommerce: How to Structure Campaigns
See how many Performance Max campaigns your monthly sales can feed so each one keeps learning, with budget data from 146 online stores.
Performance Max Optimisation: Troubleshoot in Six Steps
Find out why Performance Max isn't working before you touch settings, starting with whether the conversions it learns on are real purchases.
All articles
How Much Does Google Ads Cost an Online Store?
See what you pay for Google Ads per click, per tested product and per month: in our study of 1.4 million products, a click cost $0.20 on average.
How Google Shopping Ads Work: From Your Feed to the Auction
See the four checks a product must pass to appear in a Shopping ad, which campaigns can show it in 2026 and where most of a catalogue drops out.
Maximize Conversion Value: With or Without Target ROAS?
See when a store should run Maximize conversion value with no target and when a Target ROAS pays off, starting from the break-even ROAS your margin sets.
How Smart Bidding Works and What It Can't Fix
See what Smart Bidding learns from in a store account and why, in our data, ROAS moves with conversion rate and average order value rather than cost per click.
Target ROAS (tROAS) in Shopping and PMax: Set, Adjust, Check
Find a Target ROAS for Shopping and Performance Max that stays above break-even and still spends the budget, then change it by no more than 15% at a time.
Google Ads no longer gives you more than you asked for: why a 600% ROAS becomes 400%
On 17 August Google changed how target-based bidding works in budget-limited campaigns. Overperformance is gone. What it means for your store and what to do.
Ten categories — ten campaigns? Each of them needs 15 conversions a month
"Dumping every product into one campaign is absurd" — the most common objection from owners of multi-category stores. What actually decides who Google shows your product to, and when splitting by category is genuinely needed.
4.5M CZK into Google Ads. What we figured out
We go into the principles and explain what matters when setting up Performance Max and Google Shopping campaigns.