Google Shopping ads in 2026: Performance Max vs Standard Shopping, in 10 real accounts

What Google Shopping ads are

Google Shopping ads are Google's product ads: a photo, a price and a store name, shown in the search results and in the Shopping tab when someone searches for a product to buy. There are no keywords to pick and no copy to write. You upload a product feed to Google Merchant Center, and Google decides which product to show for which search based on what the feed says: title, description, price, availability and image.

There are two ways to run them today:

• A Standard Shopping campaign shows product ads only, with manual control over products and bids.
• Performance Max is one automated campaign that serves the same products, from the same feed, across all of Google's channels: Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps. You set a budget and a goal, and Google decides where, to whom and at what bid.

So "should we run Google Shopping ads" is really two questions: whether to show product ads, and in which campaign. The second one we can answer with data.

What we measured

Our dashboards pull spend, clicks and conversions straight from each client's Google Ads account, by campaign type as Google classifies it. For this article we took 10 Israeli ecommerce stores that advertised on Google between 1 January and 28 September 2026, ₪873 thousand of spend in total. A store counts for a campaign type when it spent ₪400 or more on it in the period. All amounts are in Israeli shekels and are media cost as Google reports it, before VAT and before management fees.

These are stores Preneuriat works with, not a random sample of the market. The numbers show what happened in these accounts, not what caused it.

Where the Google Shopping budget goes

Performance Max took 78% of all Google spend. Search campaigns, the text ads above the results, took 21%. Together: 99%.

Standard Shopping took 0.8%. Only 5 of the 10 stores put ₪400 or more into it, and all the stores together spent ₪6,893 on it in nine months.

The product ads are still there. The campaign that pays for them is no longer a Shopping campaign: in these stores they now run inside Performance Max. How much of that 78% went to product ads and how much to YouTube or Display, our data cannot split.

Shopping ads did not disappear. They moved inside Performance Max.

It is not one store pulling the average

In the median store, Performance Max took 85% of the Google budget. The lowest share was 61%, the highest 90%, and in 7 of the 10 stores it was 80% or more. It is stable through the year too: in each of the nine months, Performance Max took between 73% and 83% of pooled spend.

What a click costs, and how often people click

A Performance Max click was the cheapest of the three: ₪1.50 at the median, against ₪2.16 in Search, 44% more. Click prices by store and by month are in our article on what Google Ads costs.

But these are not the same clicks. The click-through rate on Search was 15.0%, 10 times Performance Max. Someone who types a query and clicks an ad is already looking for something. Performance Max also shows ads on YouTube, in Gmail and across Display, to people who were not searching for anything at that moment.

That is the likely explanation, and we cannot measure it: reporting by channel inside Performance Max is more limited than in separate campaigns, and our data does not split the channels.

ROAS: the medians say one thing, the stores say another

Reported ROAS is the purchase value Google attributes to a campaign, divided by what you spent on it. By the medians, Performance Max leads: 7.09, against 5.35 in Search and 4.23 in Standard Shopping. Stop here and you conclude that Performance Max returns more.

Compare inside each store and the picture flips. In 6 of the 9 stores that run both types and report purchase value, Search reported the higher ROAS. At the median, a store's Search ROAS was 43% above its own Performance Max ROAS.

Both numbers are correct. A median is the middle store in a list, and each campaign type has its own list. In Search the list splits in two: in 5 stores the ROAS was 5.35 or lower, and in 4 it was 12 or higher, up to 23.2. The median lands in the low group. In Performance Max the stores sit closer together, between 3.0 and 11.6. So the Search median comes out lower while most stores see Search report more.

Pool every shekel from every store and the two types are almost identical: 7.40 in Search, 7.11 in Performance Max. Three ways to calculate, three answers.

What spreads Search out so much? Most likely brand search. A campaign made mostly of searches for the store's own name reports a very high ROAS, because someone searching the name has already decided to buy. A campaign built on generic searches reports far less. Our data does not separate the two, so this comes from working in the accounts, not from measurement.

And every one of these numbers is what Google attributes to itself, not what reached the bank. We measured that gap in real ROAS vs reported ROAS.

What to do with this

1. Start with the feed, not the campaign type. Both campaign types draw their products from the same feed in Merchant Center. Accurate titles, good images, current prices and availability are what Google reads to decide when to show you. We did not measure this here: it is what we see working in the accounts.
2. Keep a separate Search campaign. For the brand name and for searches with clear buying intent, so you see what they cost and decide on them separately.
3. Use Standard Shopping when you need control. It still exists, for when you want to set a bid on a specific product or see exactly where the money goes. If a product runs in both, check Google's current rule on which campaign serves it. The rule has changed before.
4. Judge on real ROAS. Store revenue divided by all media spend. Reported ROAS can compare two campaigns of the same type. It cannot decide between Performance Max and Search.