Is Performance Max good for ecommerce?

It can be the largest campaign in an ecommerce account. In our sample it took 41% of Google spend at a ROAS of 2.45. It works best with a clean product feed, a purchase goal with real order values, and your brand name excluded so it has to find new buyers.

Should I run brand search next to Performance Max?

Yes, and exclude your brand terms from Performance Max. Brand search in our sample returned 6.57 in sales for every rupee, and without the exclusion Performance Max can claim those searches as its own.

How long does Performance Max take to learn?

Plan for two to three weeks before judging it, and avoid large budget or goal changes in that time. Each big change restarts part of the learning.

Performance Max for Indian ecommerce: where ₹41.8L went

Performance Max is Google's all-in-one campaign. You give it a product feed, some images, videos and headlines, and a goal. It decides where to show your ads across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Gmail and Maps. For most ecommerce accounts it ends up as the biggest line on the bill.

We looked at three Indian D2C Google Ads accounts over three months: a watch retailer, a fashion brand and a food brand, ₹41.8 lakh of spend between them. Three accounts is a small sample, so read the figures as examples of what we see rather than a market average. They still show clearly where Performance Max earns its budget and where it borrows credit.

Where the money went

Campaign type	Share of spend	CPC	Cost per conversion	ROAS
Performance Max (sales goal)	41.4%	₹3.59	₹2,769	2.45
YouTube reach	19.4%	n/a	n/a	n/a
Search, brand terms	10.2%	₹6.98	₹659	6.57
Demand Gen	9.1%	₹3.36	₹2,489	0.45
Standard Shopping (2 brands)	5.3%	₹8.46	₹1,644	2.21
Other local and awareness	14.6%	n/a	n/a	low

ROAS here is conversion value divided by spend, as Google reports it. One large campaign in the watch retailer's account had no type in its name. We counted it as Performance Max because its costs and click rates match that account's named Performance Max campaign. Without it, Performance Max cost ₹2,025 per conversion at a ROAS of 2.14.

Brand search earns the most, and Performance Max wants it

The cheapest sales in all three accounts came from people searching the brand's own name. Brand search cost ₹659 per conversion and returned 6.57 in sales for every rupee. In the median account the return was 9.34.

That is expected. Someone typing your name already wants to buy from you. The risk is what Performance Max does with those searches. It is allowed to bid on your brand name unless you tell it not to, and when it does, it takes credit for sales that brand search would have won for far less. Its reported ROAS goes up, and the number of new customers it brings stays the same.

What we do in every account:

Run brand search as its own campaign, with a small budget and your brand name and its common misspellings as keywords.
Add a brand exclusion to Performance Max. In the campaign settings, under brand exclusions, add your own brand. Performance Max then has to find people who do not know you yet, which is the job you are paying it for.
Judge Performance Max on new customers. Compare new customer orders in Shopify before and after the exclusion, not only ROAS.

Shopping costs more per click and less per sale

Standard Shopping showed up in two of the accounts, so treat it as thin. It paid more than twice Performance Max's cost per click, ₹8.46 against ₹3.59, yet each conversion cost ₹1,644 against ₹2,769.

Cheap clicks are partly how Performance Max works. It buys a lot of Display and YouTube placements that cost little per click and convert less often. Standard Shopping only shows on shopping results, where people are comparing products to buy.

The two can run together. Standard Shopping gives you a search terms report and control over bids per product, which Performance Max does not. Many accounts keep a Shopping campaign for best sellers and let Performance Max cover the rest of the catalogue.

Demand Gen and YouTube are for reach, so judge them that way

Demand Gen returned 0.45 in the two accounts running it, and YouTube reach campaigns took almost a fifth of all spend with no sales goal at all. On last-click numbers these look like waste.

They may be. They may also be filling the top of the funnel that brand search and Performance Max later convert. You cannot tell from Google's report alone. The honest test is to pause them in one region or for two weeks and watch total Shopify orders and brand searches. If nothing drops, the spend was not doing much.

Three settings that quietly break Performance Max

These came up in the accounts we looked at.

The wrong conversion goal. One account had Performance Max campaigns optimising for store visits, with every visit valued at ₹1. The reported ROAS was meaningless and the bidding had no idea what an online sale was worth. Check that sales campaigns use the purchase goal with real order values.
Search conversions not recorded. The watch retailer's non-brand search spent ₹1.18 lakh with zero conversions recorded. That is almost certainly a tracking gap, not a campaign that sold nothing. When one campaign shows zero and the rest look normal, check the conversion setup before cutting the budget.
A thin product feed. Performance Max reads your Merchant Center feed to decide what to show. Missing product types, short titles and one image per product limit where it can serve. Fix titles and add product types and extra images before blaming the campaign.

What we would do this week

Add your brand to Performance Max's brand exclusions and give brand search its own budget. Check that every sales campaign optimises for purchases with values. Then give Performance Max two to three weeks without big changes, and judge it on new customer orders in Shopify.

Source: Google Ads campaign data from 3 Indian D2C accounts (a watch retailer, a fashion brand and a food brand) run or audited by Boring Commerce, 07 Aug to 05 Nov 2026. Campaign types read from campaign names. Brands are not named.