I have an ecommerce coaching client who sells a niche, luxury product. For years, her Standard Shopping campaigns have mostly worked well, but there was one category that just wasn't hitting its reach or its efficiency goals. It's a very high-quality product, so the high price point means it looks out of place in Shopping results next to much cheaper alternatives from the likes of Amazon, Wayfair and Temu.
My client is a dedicated Inside Google Ads podcast listener and The Insider newsletter reader, so she actually suggested to me that she wanted to try a Performance Max campaign with those five underperforming SKUs. I'll admit I was skeptical, but we did need to try something completely different. The PMax campaign launched in late June, and here's the first full month of data from July.
At first glance, the PMax results looked terrible! The campaign spent $1,520 and Google Ads reported only 2 purchases, totaling $206 in revenue - an abysmal 0.14 ROAS. Most business owners would have stopped right there and said, "It failed. Let's move on."
But not this client. She understood that the in-platform metrics don't always tell the whole story. After all, she had sold a TON of product! Huh?!?
We investigated in Google Analytics, comparing the performance of this product category to overall business performance, and we saw some surprising metrics.
In July 2024, she sold 13 of these items for $1,664 in revenue. In July 2025, after launching the PMax campaign, she sold 27 of these items for $3,426 in revenue. That's a 106% year-over-year increase in revenue from these five products! For comparison, the business as a whole had grown by 50% year-over-year, so there was something special going on with these products.
We agreed that this huge increase was unlikely to be a coincidence. But we needed to investigate further...
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Next, we checked to see what sources Google Analytics said these sales were coming from. Like Google Ads, Google Analytics said that just 2 purchases came from PMax, and the rest came from "direct / none" and "google / organic."
- Direct traffic: Sales don't just fall out of the sky. Direct traffic means the user came directly to the website and/or Google Analytics just doesn't know where they came from. It's very plausible that the 380,000 impressions and 2,700 clicks from PMax in July 2025 drove subsequent "direct" sessions that converted. Because you know how many sales she got on these SKUs from direct traffic in July 2024? $0.
- Organic Google Search: Sales for this category, from organic Google search, increased 158% year-over-year. Sales for the business as a whole from Google search? 29% increase year-over-year. This stark difference points to a potential "halo effect" from the PMax campaign. It's plausible that people would see or click on the ads, and then Google the brand for further information before making a purchase.
We believe PMax was doing exactly what we hoped: engaging people who would see the value of her products, even if the final purchase wasn't attributed directly to the campaign.
This story is a great reminder not to give up too soon on a new strategy. One of the most common mistakes I see is business owners or marketers killing a campaign based on a small amount of data, especially when the in-platform numbers don't look perfect.
Here's how you can avoid this mistake in your own account:
- Look beyond the platform. Don't rely solely on Google Ads data. Check your results in Google Analytics, Shopify, or other third-party tools to get a holistic view of performance.
- Be patient. A modest budget and one month of data isn't enough to make a final decision. It takes time for new campaigns and new bidding strategies to learn and optimize.
- Set a clear testing budget. Only run tests that you can afford to lose. This gives you the runway to gather enough data to make an informed decision without putting your business at risk.
The numbers you see in Google Ads often don't tell the whole story. By looking at the bigger picture, my client and I are confident that her PMax campaign is working, even if the metrics within Google Ads still look abysmal. We're going to keep running it as long as we continue to see a boost in sales for these unique products.
Want to get PMax working for you? Book a call with me and we'll plan the right Google Ads strategy for your business.
