One of the biggest reasons new advertisers end up with Performance Max campaigns that don’t work well is simple: they follow Google’s advice.
Google Ads representatives are often well-intentioned and, in many cases, really helpful at a high level.
But it is important for marketers – especially new ones – to understand who these managers are working for, how they are motivated, and what their recommendations are optimized for.
Before defaulting to Google’s newest recommendation, it’s worth taking a step back to understand why the “new shiny toy” isn’t always the right move – and how marketers can best advocate for strategies that work for their business, not just the platform.
Google reps are not strategic consultants
Google Ads representatives play a role, and that role is often misunderstood.
They don’t:
- Manage your account for a long time.
- Know your margins, cash flow, or actual break-even ROAS.
- Understand your internal goals, inventory limits, or season.
- Get penalized if your ads lose money.
Their responsibility is not to create a sustainable acquisition strategy for your business. Instead, their main goals are:
- Expand the platform and feature discovery.
- Invest in new campaign types.
- Push automation, broad targeting, and machine learning.
That distinction is important.
Performance Max is Google’s best campaign type. It uses more inventory, more placement, and more automation across the Google ecosystem.
From Google’s perspective, it’s efficient, scalable, and profitable. From the marketer’s new point of view, however, it is often premature and poorly suited to early needs.
Dive deeper: Dealing with the frustrations of Google Ads: Poor support, suspension, rising costs
Performance Max benefits Google before it benefits you
Performance Max often benefits Google before it benefits the advertiser.
Because it automatically spends across Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube, Discover, and Gmail, Google is given close choice in where to allocate your budget. In exchange, marketers get limited visibility into what’s really driving results.
For Google, this model is perfect. It monetizes multiple areas, accelerates the adoption of automated bidding and targeting, and increases overall ad spend. For marketers – especially those with new accounts or with low data – the reality looks different.
New accounts often end up paying for upper funnel impressions before meaningful conversion data is available.
Budgets are stretched by setting low goals, CPCs can rise unexpectedly, and when performance drops, there is very little insight into what needs to be fixed or optimized.
You are often left guessing whether the problem is creating, directing, bidding, tracking, or placing.
This discrepancy is exactly why Google reps often recommend Performance Max even when the account does not have the necessary data base to be successful.
‘Best practice’ does not mean the best strategy for your business
What Google defines as “best practice” does not automatically translate into the best strategy for your business.
Google reps work from a general, platform-wide orientation rather than a custom account strategy.
Their recommendations are often driven by aggregated averages, internal discovery criteria, and products that Google promotes on an ongoing basis – not the unique facts of your business.
They are not built around your specific business model, your customer acquisition cost tolerance, your testing and learning roadmap, or your need for pre-specification and control.
As a result, strategies that may work well at scale for older, data-rich accounts often fail to deliver the same results for new or growing marketers.
What’s right for Google at scale isn’t always right for an advertiser who’s still ensuring demand, pricing, and profit.
Dig deeper: Google Ads best practices: The good, the bad and the balancing act
Smart marketers embrace automation – they don’t start with it
Smart marketers understand that automation is something you earn, not something you start.
Even today, Google Shopping Ads remain the most effective tools for new ad accounts because they are controlled, intent-driven, and based on actual purchases.
Shopping campaigns depend less on historical conversion volume and more on product feed relevance, pricing, and search intent.
That makes them uniquely suited to marketers who are still learning what works, what converts, and what’s worth more budget.
To understand how this difference plays out in performance, consider what happened to the little chocolate machine that came to me after using Performance Max based on the guidance from their dedicated Google Ads representative.
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Real-world example: When Performance Max goes wrong
The challenge was straightforward: The Google Ads merchant account was new, and Performance Max was positioned as the golden ticket to quickly build nationwide demand.
The result was a disaster.
- Spent over $3,000 in cash back on just one purchase.
- Traffic to the website and YouTube channel remains low despite the cost.
- CPCs increased to $50 per click.
- ROAS was not effective.
To make matters worse, conversion tracking wasn’t set up properly, causing Google to report inflated and inaccurate sales numbers that didn’t match Shopify at all.
Understandably, marketers lost confidence – not just in Performance Max, but in paid advertising as a whole. Before they left completely, they came to me.
Realizing that this was a new account with no reliable data, I quickly reverted the setup to a standard Google Shopping campaign.
We’ve seamlessly integrated Google Ads and Google Merchant Center into Shopify to ensure clean, accurate tracking.
From there, the campaign was broken down into product groups, allowing for more targeted bidding and clear performance indicators.
Within two weeks, real sales started rolling in.
By the end of the month, the brand had acquired 56 new customers at a cost of $53 per lead, with an average order value ranging from $115 to $200.
More importantly, the account now had clean data, clear winners, and a foundation that could support future automation.
Dig deeper: The truth about Google’s ad recommendations (and automation)
By starting with shopping campaigns, marketers can validate products, prices, and track conversions while building clean, reliable data at the product and SKU level.
This early-stage functionality proves demand, highlights top performers, and trains Google’s algorithm for meaningful shopping behavior.
Shopping Ads also offer a higher level of control and transparency than Performance Max.
Advertisers can segment by product category, brand, margin, or functional category, use negative keywords, and deliberately allocate budget to what is truly profitable.
If something isn’t working well, it’s clear why – and if something is working, it’s easy to measure.
This level of understanding is especially important early on, when every dollar spent must contribute to learning, not just impressions.
A case for the hybrid approach
General Purchasing is always High Performance for accounts that require less control over product groups and bidding – especially when margins vary widely across SKUs and precise budget allocation matters.
It allows advertisers to double down on guaranteed winners with targeted targeting, targeted bidding, and complete visibility into performance.
That said, once a marketing campaign has been running long enough to establish clear performance patterns, a hybrid approach can be very effective.
Performance Max can play a complementary role for discovery, especially for marketers with extensive product catalogs or limited bandwidth to optimize.
Used selectively, it can help test new products, reach new audiences, and expand beyond existing demand – without sacrificing the stability of capital sources.
Although Performance Max reduces visibility and control, pairing it with Standard Purchases of established players creates a balanced strategy that prioritizes profitability while still allowing room for significant growth.
Dig deep: 7 ways to differentiate Performance Max and shopping campaigns
Control first, measure second
Google reps are trained to recommend what the benefits of the platform are first, not what is safest or most efficient for a new marketer learning their market.
While Performance Max can be powerful, it only works well if it’s fueled by solid, reliable data – something many new accounts don’t have yet.
Advertisers who prioritize predictable performance, clean data, and steady growth are best served by starting with Google Shopping Ads, where targeting is high, control is strong, and optimization is transparent.
By using purchasing campaigns to validate products, understand the true cost of acquisition, and build confidence in what really converts, businesses are building a solid foundation for automation.
From there, Performance Max can be applied deliberately and profitably – used as a tool to measure proven success rather than a budget-busting shortcut.
That approach is not against Google. Direct, strategic marketing designed to protect spend and improve long-term results.
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