Building a Google Ads Strategy

Last updated: 9 August 2026

1. Executive Summary: Five Key Principles

Google Ads in 2026 is a powerful but unforgiving channel. It rewards advertisers who understand the economics before they spend, who choose the right campaign type for their specific objective, and who give the platform’s automation enough signal to do its job. It punishes those who treat it as a guaranteed traffic tap, who launch before conversion tracking is solid, or who spread thin budgets across too many campaign types simultaneously.

This article is a comprehensive, opinionated reference for senior digital marketers who need to make real decisions: whether to use Google Ads at all, which campaign types to run, how to structure and budget them, and how to combine them into a coherent strategy. Before getting into the detail, five principles govern every recommendation that follows.

Principle 1: Google Ads is a unit-economics decision, not a traffic decision. The question is never “can we get clicks?” It is always “can we acquire customers at a cost that leaves a profit after serving them?” Every campaign choice, budget decision, and bid strategy flows from that single economic test. If the maths does not work at the CPA or ROAS you can sustain, no amount of optimisation will make the channel profitable long-term.

Principle 2: Campaign type determines what you can and cannot achieve. Search, Shopping, Performance Max, Demand Gen, Display, YouTube, Local Services Ads, and App campaigns each solve a different problem. None of them is universally superior. Choosing the wrong campaign type for your objective wastes money even when every other setting is correct. Understanding the trade-offs between campaign types is as important as understanding how each one works.

Principle 3: Automation works only when it is well fed. Smart Bidding, Performance Max, Demand Gen, and broad match keyword expansion all depend on conversion signal quality and volume. Too few conversions, the wrong conversions, or broken tracking produces a system that optimises toward the wrong outcomes. The 2026 best-practice consensus is clear: fix tracking first, then scale automation.

Principle 4: Account structure should follow business logic, not platform taxonomy. The strongest accounts in 2026 are consolidated around real business goals — leads, sales, calls, bookings — with campaigns separated only where budgets, margins, locations, or conversion goals genuinely differ. Fragmented structures starve Smart Bidding of data and make optimisation harder, not easier.

Principle 5: Measure what matters downstream, not what is easiest to count. Form fills, page views, and click counts are not business outcomes. Qualified leads, booked appointments, completed purchases, and revenue are. The further your conversion definition is from a real commercial outcome, the more your optimisation diverges from your actual business goal. Every worked example in this article is anchored to a specific commercial outcome, and every recommendation can be traced back to a number.

2. Benchmarks and Numbers at a Glance

3. Should You Use Google Ads at All?

The most useful thing this article can do before discussing any campaign type is tell you when Google Ads is the wrong choice. Most articles skip this section. That is a disservice, because the channel has real prerequisites, and launching without them is expensive.

The core question: is this a demand-capture or demand-creation problem?

Google Ads Search, Shopping, and Local Services Ads are fundamentally demand-capture channels. They intercept people who are already looking for a product or service. They do not work well when no one is searching. If your business sells something genuinely new, something most buyers do not yet know they need, or something described in language no buyer has yet adopted, then the search volume will be low, the CPCs will be high relative to the audience size, and the channel will struggle regardless of how well you manage it.

Demand Gen, Display, and YouTube can create or shape demand, but they carry their own prerequisites: strong creative, meaningful budgets, and clear audience logic. They are not substitutes for a weak offer or an untested value proposition.

The first honest question is therefore: do people already search, in meaningful volume, for what you sell? If the answer is no, or barely, start with SEO, content, social, PR, or outbound before committing to paid search.

The economic tests

Even when search demand exists, Google Ads may still be the wrong channel if the economics do not support it. There are three tests every business should run before spending.

Test 1: Can you sustain a profitable CPA?

Your maximum sustainable CPA is derived from the gross profit value of a customer, minus the overhead and reinvestment margin you need to keep. The formula is:

Maximum CPA ≈ (Revenue per customer × Gross margin) − overhead and reinvestment buffer

For lead generation, extend this to account for your close rate:

Maximum CPL ≈ Maximum CPA per customer × Close rate from lead to customer

If the CPA ceiling this formula produces is below what the market charges for a click in your category, Google Ads will not be profitable for you at meaningful scale. You can check this quickly with Google Keyword Planner CPC estimates before spending anything.

Test 2: Can you define and measure a real conversion?

A conversion must represent an outcome with measurable business value: a completed purchase, a submitted lead form followed by a phone call, a booked appointment, or a phone call of meaningful duration. Page views of a contact page, generic “thank you” page visits, and bounce-rate thresholds are not business outcomes. If you cannot define a real conversion and measure it cleanly before launch, delay the channel and fix your tracking first. Launching with bad tracking is not a neutral act — it actively misleads your optimisation and makes the channel look better or worse than it really is.^[4]

Test 3: Is your landing page and offer strong enough to convert the traffic?

Google Ads cannot fix a weak offer, a slow page, or a confusing message. The average Search conversion rate across all industries is 8.18%,^[28] but this masks a wide range. If your landing page is converting at 1–2% on traffic you believe is qualified, the problem is not your bid strategy or your keywords. Fix the page, the offer, or the trust signals before scaling spend.

When Google Ads is the wrong choice

The go/no-go scorecard

Before launching, answer these four questions. All four need a “yes” to proceed with confidence:

• Demand: Do people already search for what you sell in sufficient volume to justify the channel?
• Economics: Does your gross profit per customer, adjusted for close rate, support a CPA above what the market charges?
• Measurement: Can you define and track a conversion that represents real business value?
• Quality: Is your landing page and offer strong enough to convert qualified traffic at a commercially viable rate?

If any answer is “no,” identify and fix that constraint before spending. The worked example below shows how to run this test with real numbers.

4. Objectives and Conversions

The single most consequential decision you make in a Google Ads account is what you tell the system to optimise toward. Everything else — campaign type, bid strategy, match types, audiences, budgets — is downstream of that choice. Get it wrong and you can have technically excellent campaign settings producing commercially useless results.

Matching objective to campaign type

Google Ads surfaces several high-level campaign objectives when you create a campaign: Sales, Leads, Website traffic, App promotion, Brand awareness and reach, and Local store visits and promotions. These labels are useful starting points, but they are not a substitute for being specific about what commercial outcome you are trying to drive.

For most businesses, the commercially meaningful objectives are a short list:

• Qualified lead: a form submission, call, or chat that has a realistic chance of becoming a paying customer. Not every form fill qualifies.
• Sale or purchase: a completed transaction with a known value.
• Booked appointment or demo: a calendar event with a specific person, not a generic interest submission.
• Store visit: a physical visit to a retail or service location, measurable through Google’s visit modelling.
• Repeat purchase or subscription renewal: relevant for retention-focused campaigns.

What is conspicuously absent from this list: page views, session duration, form page visits, and “engaged sessions.” These are diagnostic metrics, not objectives. Using them as conversion goals trains the algorithm to find people who browse, not people who buy.

Primary versus secondary conversions

Google Ads allows you to designate conversions as “Primary” (used for bidding) or “Secondary” (tracked but not used for bidding). In 2026 best practice, you should have one primary conversion goal per campaign motion — the one that directly represents your commercial objective. Secondary conversions such as phone number clicks, video views of a product tour, or PDF downloads can be tracked to inform diagnostics, but should not drive Smart Bidding unless they are tightly and provably correlated with actual sales.

The practical risk of over-counting secondary events as primary conversions is that Smart Bidding will find an enormous supply of cheap signals that look like success while real revenue stays flat. This is one of the most common and most expensive mistakes in Google Ads accounts.^[4]

Sales cycle alignment

Your objective should also match the sales cycle length:

• Short cycles (same day to one week): optimise directly to purchase, booking, or completed contact. The signal is fast enough for Smart Bidding to learn from.
• Medium cycles (one to four weeks): optimise to a qualified lead event and monitor downstream quality closely. Consider importing CRM stage data.
• Long B2B cycles (one to six months): optimise to a qualified meeting or a pipeline-entered lead. Pass offline conversion data from your CRM back into Google Ads using the Offline Conversion Import feature, so the system learns from deals that close rather than from raw enquiries.

For long cycles specifically, the gap between the conversion Google Ads counts and the revenue your business receives can be months. Accounts that do not close this loop consistently over-invest in campaigns that look active but are generating leads that never convert downstream.

Conversion action setup: the practical checklist

• Use Google Tag or Google Tag Manager to fire conversion tags on genuine business outcomes, not intermediate pages.
• Enable Enhanced Conversions where possible to improve match rates for logged-in users.
• Set conversion values where known — either fixed (for a lead with an average deal value) or dynamic (for ecommerce transactions).
• Set appropriate attribution models. Data-driven attribution is the 2026 default and generally the right choice for accounts with sufficient volume. For new accounts with thin data, last-click may be more interpretable while you build volume.
• Audit conversion tags quarterly. Tag drift — where a tag that once fired correctly stops firing after a site rebuild — is a silent killer of Smart Bidding performance.

5. Unit Economics: What a Customer Is Worth

Every budget decision, CPA target, and ROAS target in Google Ads is an expression of what a customer is worth to your business. If that figure is unknown, wrong, or based on revenue rather than profit, every downstream decision is built on a flawed foundation. This section shows you how to calculate it correctly, and how to translate it into specific Google Ads bid strategy settings.

Gross profit per customer, not revenue

The most common mistake in unit economics calculations is using revenue as the measure of customer value. Revenue overstates what you can afford to spend on acquisition because it includes the cost of goods, delivery, fulfilment, and service. The correct starting point is gross profit per customer.

For ecommerce: Gross profit per order = Average order value × Gross margin percentage

For services: Gross profit per customer = Average fee × (1 − cost of delivery as a percentage of fee)

For subscription businesses: Use gross profit LTV, not gross profit on the first transaction. But be conservative: if your average customer stays for 14 months but your business is three years old and churn is variable, do not use optimistic forward projections. Use observed cohort data.

From gross profit to maximum CPA

Once you have gross profit per customer, apply a buffer for overhead and reinvestment so the channel remains scalable rather than merely break-even:

Maximum sustainable CPA = Gross profit per customer − Overhead and growth buffer

The overhead buffer will vary by business, but a reasonable starting rule is to ensure Google Ads spend does not consume more than 30–40% of gross profit per customer acquired, leaving the remainder for operations and margin. For businesses with high fixed costs, the buffer may need to be higher.

For lead generation: working backwards from close rate

When Google Ads drives leads rather than direct sales, you need to pass through your sales funnel to find what each lead is worth:

Maximum CPL = Maximum sustainable CPA × Close rate (lead to customer)

This is the number you use to set your Target CPA bid strategy in Google Ads. It is not a suggestion — it is the ceiling above which the channel cannot be profitable regardless of how many leads it delivers.

For ecommerce: calculating break-even and target ROAS

The break-even ROAS is the minimum return on ad spend at which Google Ads neither adds nor destroys margin:

Break-even ROAS = 1 ÷ Gross margin

At 40% gross margin, break-even ROAS = 1 ÷ 0.40 = 2.5× (250%). This means every $1 spent on ads must return at least $2.50 in revenue just to cover product costs, before accounting for overhead, fulfilment, returns, and platform fees. Your actual target ROAS should be set higher than break-even — typically at the level that covers all variable costs and contributes to fixed overhead.

If your gross margin is 40% and your combined overhead and fulfilment costs represent a further 15% of revenue, then your true break-even ROAS is 1 ÷ (0.40 − 0.15) = 1 ÷ 0.25 = 4.0×. Setting a Target ROAS of 400% in this case keeps you at break-even. Anything below 400% loses money. Set the target meaningfully above that level to generate actual profit contribution.

Lifetime value: use it carefully

LTV-based bidding allows you to justify a higher CPA or lower ROAS on the first purchase by accounting for repeat revenue. This can unlock greater scale. However, LTV-based targets should only be used when:

• You have observed, not modelled, repeat purchase data from real customer cohorts.
• Your churn rate is stable and measurable.
• The time to recover the first-order loss is short enough that the business can sustain the cash flow gap.

Do not project optimistic LTV from a business with less than 18 months of customer data. Use the first-order gross profit as your base case and treat any LTV upside as a bonus you can allocate more spend against once it is proven.^[1]

6. Setting and Estimating the Budget

Budget-setting is where unit economics meet operational reality. The goal is not to spend as much as possible or as little as possible — it is to spend enough to generate sufficient conversion data for Smart Bidding to learn, and enough to produce the leads or sales volume the business needs, while staying within a CPA or ROAS envelope that keeps the channel profitable.

The fundamental budgeting rule

Your budget must be large enough to generate enough conversions for your bidding strategy to learn reliably. The widely cited practitioner heuristic for Smart Bidding stability is 30–50 conversions per campaign per month.^[11] If your budget cannot realistically produce that volume, you have two options:

• Consolidate: reduce the number of campaigns so the budget is concentrated enough to hit the threshold in fewer campaigns.
• Accept slower learning: run manual CPC or Maximise Clicks temporarily while accumulating data, then switch to Target CPA or Maximise Conversions once volume justifies it.

The worst outcome is splitting a small budget across many campaigns in an attempt to replicate an enterprise structure. Each campaign then has insufficient data to optimise, performance is noisy, and you make decisions on samples too small to be statistically meaningful.

How to estimate a starting monthly budget

The simplest and most reliable method:

Starting monthly budget = Target conversions per month × Expected CPA, with a 20–30% variance buffer for the learning period

For ecommerce, substitute: Starting monthly budget = Target revenue ÷ Target ROAS, with the same buffer

To estimate expected CPA before you have account data, use industry benchmarks as a directional starting point — not as a guarantee. The cross-industry average CPA for Search is approximately USD $66.69,^[152] but your specific vertical and market will differ. Use Keyword Planner estimated CPCs combined with benchmark conversion rates to produce a rough CPA estimate before committing budget.

The learning period budget consideration

New campaigns go through a learning period in which Smart Bidding is less efficient than it will be at maturity. During this period — typically the first two to four weeks — CPAs tend to be higher and conversion volume lower than steady-state performance. Budget for this by either setting a slightly higher CPA target during the learning period and tightening it once volume stabilises, or by accepting that the first 30 days of spend is partly a data-acquisition cost rather than a revenue-generating cost.

Daily versus monthly budget mechanics (2026 update)

As of June 1, 2026, Google now paces spend toward the full monthly limit based on 30.4 × the daily budget, even when ads only run on certain days.^[132] This means that if you set a $100 daily budget but only run ads on weekdays (22 days per month), Google may still spend up to $100 × 30.4 = $3,040 in the month, concentrated into those 22 days. This represents a meaningful change to how ad scheduling interacts with budget caps. Review any campaign using ad scheduling and verify that monthly spend caps are set explicitly if you need hard monthly controls.

Budget allocation across campaign types

There is no universally correct allocation, but the 2026 consensus across multiple sources converges on one principle: put the majority of budget into the highest-intent campaigns first, then allocate a controlled proportion to expansion campaigns once the core is profitable.^[4] A practical starting framework:

• Lead generation, limited budget: 80–90% to core non-brand Search, 10–20% to brand defence. No upper-funnel spend until Search is profitable and tracked.
• Lead generation, moderate budget: 60–70% to Search, 20–30% to Performance Max (only after 30+ conversions/month), 10% to Demand Gen testing.
• Ecommerce: 60–80% to Shopping or Performance Max, 15–25% to Search (brand and bottom-funnel), 5–15% to Demand Gen or YouTube prospecting once core ROAS is proven.
• Local services: 70–85% to Search (service keywords plus “near me” intent), 10–15% to brand, 0–15% to Performance Max only where local lead quality is measurable.

7. The Campaign Types at a Glance

Google Ads offers seven major campaign types that matter in 2026. Each solves a different problem, serves a different stage of the buying journey, and has different prerequisites for success. The table below summarises all of them across the dimensions most relevant to a strategic decision. Detailed deep-dives on each follow in sections 8 through 11.

8. Search Campaigns in Depth

How Search campaigns work

Search campaigns show text ads against user search queries on Google Search and Search partner sites. The mechanics are straightforward: you define keywords, write ads, set bids, and Google enters you into an auction every time a query matches one of your keywords. Ad Rank — the formula that determines whether your ad shows and in what position — is determined by your bid, your Quality Score (a composite of expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience), and the expected impact of your assets such as sitelinks, callouts, and structured snippets.^[18]

In 2026, Smart Bidding strategies — Maximise Conversions, Target CPA, Maximise Conversion Value, and Target ROAS — dominate Search campaign management. These strategies use machine learning to adjust bids in real time based on dozens of contextual signals: device, location, time of day, browser, search history, and audience membership. The practical effect is that manual CPC bidding is rarely the right starting point once a campaign has meaningful conversion data; Smart Bidding generally outperforms manual bidding when the conversion signal is clean and the data volume is sufficient.^[17]

Match types remain one of the most consequential settings in a Search campaign. In 2026:

• Exact match triggers ads only on queries that match the keyword meaning closely. It gives the most control and the most predictable traffic, but it limits scale.
• Phrase match triggers ads on queries that include the keyword’s meaning in the same sequence, with additional words allowed before or after. A middle-ground between control and reach.
• Broad match triggers ads on the widest range of related queries, including synonyms, related topics, and implied meanings. It can discover valuable query variants but requires strong negative keyword management and reliable conversion data to avoid wasting spend.^[6]

The 2026 consensus among practitioners is to start new campaigns with phrase and exact match on core themes, introduce broad match selectively once conversion tracking is stable, and pair broad match exclusively with Smart Bidding — never with manual CPC, because without a Smart Bidding strategy to constrain it, broad match will frequently buy irrelevant traffic at full price.^[6]

When Search is the right choice

Search is the right choice when:

• Buyers are already searching for your product or service by name, category, or problem description.
• You need precise control over which queries trigger your ads and which do not.
• Your conversion goal is bottom-funnel — a lead, a call, a purchase, a booking — and the user intent behind a search query is a reliable signal of commercial readiness.
• You want brand defence: protecting your own branded terms from competitor conquesting or affiliate hijacking.
• Your budget is moderate and needs to work efficiently, because Search generally produces the highest-intent traffic per dollar spent compared with broader campaign types.^[18]
• 10. Demand Gen, Display and Video in Depth

  Demand Gen, Display, and Video campaigns occupy the upper and mid funnel of a Google Ads strategy. They do not intercept active search queries; instead, they interrupt users during content consumption, discovery, and social-feed browsing to create or accelerate purchase intent. In 2026, Google has significantly consolidated these formats: Video Action Campaigns have been migrated into Demand Gen, and Google Display Network (GDN) inventory is now accessible from within Demand Gen campaigns.^[56] Understanding what each format actually does, and what it costs you, is essential before committing budget to any of them.

  Demand Gen Campaigns

  How Demand Gen Works

  Demand Gen campaigns use image and video creative assets, audience signals, and Google’s AI to serve ads across YouTube (including Shorts), Discover, Gmail, Maps, and now the GDN.^[56][57][58] Unlike Search, which responds to an expressed query, Demand Gen targets people based on who they are, what content they consume, and what Google predicts about their future behaviour. The campaign learns which creative assets, audiences, and placements produce the most conversions or engagement, and it shifts delivery accordingly. Advertisers provide asset groups (images, videos, headlines, descriptions, logos), audience signals (Customer Match lists, website visitors, in-market segments, lookalikes), and a budget and conversion goal; Google’s system manages placement and optimisation from there.^[56][57][58]

  In February 2026, Google confirmed that adding GDN inventory into Demand Gen was associated with a 9.5% average increase in ROI across accounts that opened the channel.^[56] Google also introduced channel controls, allowing advertisers to bias delivery toward YouTube, Discover, Gmail, or GDN separately, which gives a meaningful level of placement management that did not exist in earlier iterations of the product.^[56][57]

  When Demand Gen Is the Right Choice

  • You want to reach people before they begin actively searching, to create or accelerate demand that your Search campaign will later capture.
  • You have strong visual or video creative and want distribution across Google’s discovery surfaces rather than just the SERP.
  • You want to run prospecting and remarketing from a single system with unified creative and audience logic.
  • You have enough conversion volume and tracking quality for Google’s automation to learn from real outcomes, not just engagement signals.
  • Your Search campaign is already efficient and you want incremental reach beyond the query universe.

  Upsides

  • Broad, curated reach: Access to YouTube, Shorts, Discover, Gmail, Maps, and GDN from one campaign means Demand Gen reaches audiences across the most-used surfaces in Google’s ecosystem.^[56][57]
  • Creative flexibility: Demand Gen supports a richer creative mix than Performance Max, including specific image-only asset groups and video-specific asset groups, giving advertisers more control over which creative appears on which surface.^[58]
  • Strong prospecting capability: It is specifically designed to find new or lapsed users before search intent exists, which complements a Search campaign’s intent-capture function.^[57]
  • Remarketing integration: Customer Match lists, website visitor audiences, and engagement-based remarketing work well within Demand Gen, so you can run both prospecting and retargeting from the same campaign structure.^[56]
  • Lookalike expansion: Google builds lookalike segments from your seed audience lists, and as of 2026, these are available within Demand Gen for prospecting scale.^[70]

  Downsides

  • View-through attribution inflation: Demand Gen is heavily exposed to view-through conversion bias. A user who sees a Demand Gen ad and later converts through Search will often be credited to Demand Gen in platform reporting, making the campaign appear more efficient than it actually is on an incremental basis. This is the single most dangerous measurement risk in these campaign types.^[56]
  • Placement quality risk when GDN is opened: Expanding into GDN reintroduces the quality and brand-safety concerns historically associated with broad Display buying. Not all GDN placements are appropriate for all brands, and without active exclusions, spend can flow to low-quality app inventory and irrelevant sites.^[56]
  • Creative dependency: If your images or video are weak, Demand Gen campaigns deteriorate quickly. Google’s February 2026 guidance is explicit that Excellent Ad Strength and a comprehensive asset set are prerequisites for strong performance.^[58] A campaign running with a single static image and no video is not using Demand Gen effectively.
  • Less suitable as a standalone channel: Demand Gen works best when paired with Search or Performance Max so that the intent captured by those campaigns validates the demand Demand Gen is supposedly creating. Running Demand Gen in isolation makes it very difficult to distinguish real incremental value from attribution credit.
  • Not right for very small budgets: Multiple practitioners recommend a floor of approximately $50–$100 AUD per day per campaign for Demand Gen to achieve stable learning. Below that threshold, impressions are too thin to produce actionable conversion data.^[64][68]

  Trade-offs Versus Other Campaign Types

  Versus	What you gain with Demand Gen	What you give up
  Search	Broader reach, creative storytelling, audience-based targeting, upper-funnel discovery	Intent signal, query-level control, direct bottom-funnel efficiency
  Performance Max	Greater creative control per surface, clearer audience-to-creative alignment, no Shopping feed required	Shopping feed integration, broader cross-network automation, fewer decisions for the advertiser to make
  Display (standalone)	Better inventory curation, richer creative surfaces, YouTube and Shorts access, stronger prospecting logic	Simplicity of a single-surface remarketing tool; Display alone is cheaper for pure GDN remarketing
  YouTube (Video campaigns)	Unified audience management across surfaces; simpler campaign structure	Granular video-placement controls that existed in legacy Video Action Campaigns before migration

  Minimum Viable Monthly Budget

  The practical minimum for a Demand Gen campaign to exit the learning phase and produce actionable data is approximately $3,000–$4,500 AUD per month (equivalent to roughly $100–$150 AUD per day), based on the practitioner threshold of $50–$100 USD per day and an approximate AUD/USD exchange adjustment.^[64][68] Accounts running tCPA bidding should ensure the budget is at least 10 times the target CPA to give the system enough room to learn. Below $3,000 AUD per month, Demand Gen typically produces insufficient conversion volume to optimise meaningfully and should be replaced by a tighter remarketing strategy within a Search or Performance Max campaign.

  Worked example

  Demand Gen for a B2C Online Education Provider

  • Setup: A Sydney-based online education provider selling professional development courses at $890 AUD average order value spends $8,000 AUD per month across Google Ads. Search is already running at a $142 AUD CPA (well within the sustainable ceiling) with 30 conversions per month. The team wants to grow enrolment volume by reaching people before they search for the course category.
  • Numbers: Benchmark Health & Medical CPA is approximately $78 USD ≈ $118 AUD.^[141] At $890 AUD revenue and a 55% gross margin, gross profit per sale is $490 AUD. A $142 AUD CPA leaves $348 AUD contribution margin per enrolment. Allocating $2,400 AUD/month to Demand Gen (30% of total budget) at a $180 AUD tCPA target (set 27% above the proven Search CPA as a prospecting premium) gives a theoretical ceiling of 2,400 ÷ 180 = 13 additional conversions per month. Opening GDN within Demand Gen targets the 9.5% ROI uplift cited in Google’s February 2026 guidance.^[56]
  • Decision: Launch one Demand Gen campaign at $80 AUD/day ($2,400 AUD/month) with tCPA set to $180 AUD, channel controls set to exclude Gmail (low commercial intent for this audience), and three asset groups: one video-led YouTube group, one image-led Discover/GDN group, and one remarketing group targeting 30-day site visitors who did not purchase.
  • Why: The Search campaign is already producing enough conversion signal (30/month) and the gross margin supports a prospecting CPA premium of up to $348 AUD per sale, making a $180 AUD Demand Gen tCPA economically viable even if incremental attribution is only 50% as efficient as last-click reporting suggests.

  Display Campaigns

  How Display Works

  Standard Display campaigns serve visual banner and responsive ads across the Google Display Network — the broad ecosystem of third-party websites, apps, and Google-owned properties that carry GDN inventory. In 2026, Google is progressively migrating standalone Display campaigns into Demand Gen for many advertisers, so Display as a separate product is becoming less central to new account strategy.^[56] Where Display remains distinct, its core utility is cheap, scalable remarketing: re-engaging known audiences at low CPM across a wide inventory pool.

  When Display Is the Right Choice

  • Your primary goal is remarketing to existing site visitors, cart abandoners, or customer lists at low cost per impression.
  • You want simple, inexpensive frequency across a broad web inventory without the creative complexity of Demand Gen.
  • Your audience size is small and well-defined, making lookalike prospecting less relevant.
  • You are running Display as a supporting layer alongside Search, not as the primary acquisition channel.

  Upsides

  • Very low CPM relative to other Google formats, making it the cheapest way to maintain brand presence with site visitors.
  • Remarketing lists from Google Analytics or the Google Ads tag work well in Display for re-engagement.
  • Simple creative requirements: responsive display ads adapt to available placements without the full asset set needed for Demand Gen.

  Downsides

  • Placement quality is the most serious ongoing risk. Without aggressive exclusions — app categories, parked domains, irrelevant topics — GDN spending can concentrate on low-quality inventory that generates accidental clicks and inflated conversion counts through view-through attribution.
  • Limited prospecting effectiveness: Display prospecting to cold audiences rarely matches the efficiency of Search or even well-structured Demand Gen. It is largely a reminder medium, not an acquisition medium.
  • Being absorbed into Demand Gen: For new accounts in 2026, standalone Display is increasingly a legacy choice. Google’s migration makes Demand Gen the recommended path for any new visual campaign setup.^[56]

  Trade-offs Versus Demand Gen

  Display is cheaper per impression and simpler to set up for remarketing but delivers less prospecting power, no YouTube or Shorts access, and weaker audience expansion than Demand Gen. For most accounts building a new campaign mix in 2026, Demand Gen is the better default for any visual campaign with a prospecting element. Display remains useful as a pure remarketing tool when budget is constrained and Demand Gen’s minimum viable spend cannot be justified.

  Minimum Viable Monthly Budget

  Display remarketing can operate from as little as $600–$900 AUD per month, because the audience is already known and smaller, impression frequency rather than prospecting volume is the goal, and CPMs are lower. However, at this level, audience sizes must be substantial (at minimum 1,000 active cookie or list members) to generate meaningful reach. Below 1,000 audience members, Display remarketing typically produces too few impressions to have measurable business impact.

  YouTube and Video Campaigns

  How YouTube/Video Works

  In 2026, Video Action Campaigns have been migrated into Demand Gen, so the practical choice for direct-response video is to run Demand Gen with video-led asset groups.^[56] Standalone YouTube video campaigns continue to exist for awareness-focused objectives such as reach, brand lift, and view maximisation, but the conversion-optimised video format now lives primarily within Demand Gen.

  For awareness objectives, YouTube video campaigns serve skippable in-stream ads, non-skippable bumper ads, and Shorts ads, with bidding options including CPV (cost per view), CPM (cost per thousand impressions), and Target CPM for reach-focused campaigns. The creative asset is the entire proposition: unlike Search, where the keyword does much of the qualifying work, on YouTube the video must earn attention in the first five seconds before a skip is possible.

  When YouTube/Video Is the Right Choice

  • Your product or service requires demonstration, narrative, or emotional storytelling to convert.
  • You are building brand awareness or consideration at scale, where CPM-based reach is the goal rather than immediate conversion.
  • You want to run sequential messaging — showing different creative to users based on prior video engagement.
  • Your creative budget can support genuine platform-native video production, not a repurposed television commercial or a static image with a logo.

  Upsides

  • YouTube is among the largest video platforms globally, providing scale for broad awareness campaigns that no other Google property matches.
  • Video sequencing allows you to build multi-step narrative arcs, moving users from awareness to consideration to intent over time.
  • For high-consideration purchases — major appliances, vehicles, B2B software, financial products — video can substantially accelerate the consideration phase when the creative is genuinely informative or compelling.

  Downsides

  • Creative quality determines everything. A weak video in a YouTube campaign wastes budget at scale. Unlike Search, where a mediocre ad still gets clicked if it answers the query, a mediocre YouTube ad is skipped in five seconds and produces zero value.
  • Attribution is complex: YouTube awareness campaigns rarely produce direct last-click conversions. If your measurement system only reads last-click, YouTube will appear to do nothing even when it is genuinely assisting downstream conversion. Without a lift study or data-driven attribution model, it is very difficult to prove YouTube’s incremental contribution.
  • Expensive to do properly: Producing platform-native video creative, running at sufficient reach and frequency to register with audiences, and then measuring lift accurately requires both creative budget and measurement sophistication that many small and mid-market advertisers do not have.

  Trade-offs Versus Demand Gen and Search

  YouTube awareness campaigns are the right choice when brand consideration is the objective and you have the creative to support it. They are the wrong choice when immediate conversion efficiency is needed or when creative quality cannot be guaranteed. For accounts that want video-led conversion optimisation, Demand Gen with video asset groups is the 2026 path; pure YouTube awareness campaigns are for brand-building, not bottom-funnel efficiency.

  Minimum Viable Monthly Budget for Video/YouTube

  For a YouTube awareness campaign to reach enough individuals at sufficient frequency to produce measurable consideration lift, most practitioners recommend a minimum of $5,000–$7,000 AUD per month. Below that threshold, reach is too thin to accumulate frequency, and lift studies lack statistical power. Direct-response video via Demand Gen should follow the Demand Gen minimums above.

  Worked example

  YouTube Awareness for a High-Consideration Home Renovation Product

  • Setup: A Melbourne-based manufacturer of custom outdoor pergola systems selling at $12,000–$18,000 AUD average project value runs Search campaigns at a $310 AUD CPA for form-fill leads, with a 15% lead-to-sale close rate, yielding an effective cost per acquired customer of $310 ÷ 0.15 = $2,067 AUD. Gross profit per sale at 42% margin on a $15,000 AUD average is $6,300 AUD, leaving $4,233 AUD contribution after acquisition cost. The business wants to shorten the average 45-day consideration window.
  • Numbers: A $6,000 AUD/month YouTube awareness budget at a Target CPM of $12 AUD delivers approximately 6,000 ÷ 12 × 1,000 = 500,000 impressions per month. At an average reach frequency of 4 impressions per unique user, that covers approximately 125,000 unique individuals per month within the Melbourne metro target area. If 0.08% of exposed users subsequently search and convert (a conservative assisted-conversion assumption), the campaign contributes approximately 100 additional search-driven leads per quarter, worth 100 × 0.15 × $6,300 = $94,500 AUD in gross profit. This is not provable without a brand lift study, which is why the business commits to running a Google Brand Lift study from October 2026 launch.
  • Decision: Launch a YouTube non-skippable bumper ad campaign at $200 AUD/day ($6,000 AUD/month) with Target CPM bidding at $12 AUD, targeting in-market for Home & Garden: Home Improvement within a 50 km radius of Melbourne CBD, running from 1 October 2026 with a 90-day brand lift study enabled.
  • Why: The gross profit per customer ($6,300 AUD) is large enough to justify upper-funnel spend at this scale; the lift study creates the measurement accountability needed to evaluate continuation after 90 days rather than relying on view-through attribution alone.

  Remarketing Versus Prospecting: Choosing the Right Format

  Goal	Best format	Why	Key risk
  Re-engage recent site visitors	Display or Demand Gen remarketing group	Low CPM, known audience, reminder-style messaging is sufficient	View-through inflation; place a conversion window cap
  Re-engage cart abandoners (ecommerce)	Demand Gen or Performance Max	High-intent known audience; richer creative can increase urgency	Overlap with PMax if both are running simultaneously
  Prospect into new audiences	Demand Gen (lookalike + in-market signals)	Built for discovery; broader than pure remarketing	Attribution credit inflation; measure with data-driven attribution
  Video-led brand consideration	YouTube awareness campaign or Demand Gen video asset group	Video earns consideration that images cannot	Creative quality must be high; attribution is indirect
  Bottom-funnel intent capture	Search, not Display/Video/Demand Gen	Query intent is more predictive of purchase than placement interest	Demand Gen or Display running simultaneously may steal last-click credit

  Creative Requirements by Format

  Google’s February 2026 Demand Gen guidance explicitly identifies creative quality as a primary performance driver.^[58] The following requirements are not optional extras — campaigns that do not meet them typically underperform against accounts that do.

  Format	Minimum asset requirement	Best-practice asset set
  Demand Gen	At least 5 images, 1 video, 5 headlines, 5 descriptions, 1 logo	15+ images across landscape/square/portrait ratios, 3+ videos (15s, 30s, 6s bumper), multiple CTA variants, Excellent Ad Strength confirmed[58]
  Display (responsive)	At least 3 images, 1 logo, 5 headlines, 5 descriptions	Multiple image sizes, strong brand colours, single clear CTA per ad group
  YouTube (awareness)	1 video per ad format (bumper = 6s max; skippable = 15–60s recommended)	Hook in first 3 seconds, brand logo within first 5 seconds, sound-off subtitle overlay, mobile-first framing

  11. Local and Other Campaign Types

  Beyond the mainstream Search, Shopping, Performance Max, Demand Gen, Display, and YouTube campaign families, two distinct campaign types matter enough in 2026 to warrant their own deep-dive treatment: Local Services Ads (LSAs) and App campaigns. LSAs have undergone the most significant structural change of any Google Ads product in 2026, migrating into Google Ads as a specialised Performance Max pay-per-lead experience. Understanding the practical implications of that migration — and the fundamental trade-offs LSAs and App campaigns make relative to mainstream campaign types — is essential for any advertiser in the relevant verticals.

  Local Services Ads (LSAs)

  How LSAs Work in 2026

  Local Services Ads connect local service businesses with searchers in a specific geographic area. Advertisers are charged per valid lead — typically a phone call, message, or booking — rather than per click.^[76][82] In 2026, eligible advertisers manage LSAs directly inside Google Ads as a specialised Performance Max pay-per-lead campaign type, replacing the separate LSA dashboard that previously existed.^[75][77] The core behaviour of the product has not changed: campaigns remain keywordless, targeting is determined by service category, service area, and Google Business Profile data, and ads appear only on Google Search and Google Maps.^[75][77]

  The migration to Google Ads brings several structural changes. Daily budgets replace the previous weekly budget framework, and Google Business Profile data is synced directly into campaign management.^[77] The Google Verified badge, review count, star rating, business photo, and service area information continue to display in the ad unit, making trust signals a central part of the LSA proposition.^[76][82]

  Targeting is entirely automated: the advertiser selects service categories, defines the service area, and sets a budget; Google’s system determines which searches trigger the ad and how to rank it relative to other LSA advertisers in that area. Ranking factors include review rating, review count, responsiveness, proximity, and budget adequacy.^[79][88]

  When LSAs Are the Right Choice

  • Your business is an eligible local service provider: plumbers, electricians, locksmiths, cleaners, HVAC technicians, lawyers, real estate agents, financial advisers, and similar categories that Google has approved for the LSA programme.^[82][84]
  • Your conversion event is a phone call, message, or direct booking — not a website visit or form fill.
  • You want to pay only for leads, not for clicks that may not convert.
  • You have a strong Google Business Profile with a meaningful review count (generally 10+ reviews is a practical starting point for competitive ranking).^[88]
  • You want the simplest possible campaign setup and are willing to trade keyword-level control for that simplicity.

  Upsides

  • Pay-per-lead billing dramatically reduces click waste. You are charged only when a user calls, messages, or books — not when they see or click the ad without converting.^[76][82]
  • Prime Search and Maps placement. LSAs appear above standard Search ads in many local service queries, giving eligible businesses top-of-page presence without needing to win a keyword auction.^[75][76]
  • Keywordless setup simplifies management. There are no keywords to research, structure, or maintain. Google determines relevance from the service category and business data.^[75][77]
  • Trust signals embedded in the ad unit. The Google Verified badge, review stars, and business photo are built into the ad, reducing the trust-building burden that standard Search ads carry.^[76][82]
  • Lead dispute mechanism. Advertisers can dispute leads that do not meet valid criteria, such as calls from outside the service area or for services not offered, and receive credit for invalid leads.^[84]

  Downsides

  • No keyword-level control. You cannot choose which specific queries trigger your LSA, prevent irrelevant matches, or build a keyword strategy. Google determines relevance, and you have no direct influence beyond the service category selection.^[75][77]
  • No ad copy control. The creative elements are pulled from your Google Business Profile and the LSA product format; you cannot write custom headlines or descriptions the way you can in Search campaigns.
  • Eligibility is gating. LSAs are only available for specific service verticals in approved geographic markets. If your business category or location is not supported, this option does not exist for you.^[82][84]
  • Lead quality varies. Even the pay-per-lead model does not guarantee quality. You may still receive calls from users who are price shopping, have the wrong service need, or are outside your acceptable job size. The dispute mechanism helps, but active intake management is required.
  • Competitive on review count. A business with 5 reviews will typically rank below a competitor with 80 reviews at similar budget levels. If your Google Business Profile is underdeveloped, LSAs will underperform regardless of budget.^[88]
  • No website landing-page involvement. LSA leads bypass your website entirely. This is an upside for conversion efficiency but a downside if you want to educate, qualify, or pre-sell prospects through content before they make contact.

  Trade-offs Versus Other Campaign Types

  Versus	What LSAs give you	What you give up
  Search campaigns	Pay-per-lead billing, simpler management, top placement, trust badge	Keyword control, ad copy control, landing-page strategy, query-level visibility
  Performance Max	Cleaner local focus, lead-billing model, minimal management overhead	Multi-surface reach, creative control, cross-network inventory, feed-based optimisation
  Demand Gen / Display / Video	Much higher purchase intent; leads are at the point of decision, not discovery	No awareness or consideration-stage reach; LSAs do not build brand recall

  Minimum Viable Monthly Budget

  LSAs do not have a fixed minimum budget in Google’s published guidance; budget is set as a daily cap, and spend is determined by lead volume and cost per lead in the category.^[82][84] In practice, a useful minimum is the amount needed to receive enough leads each month to evaluate lead quality and dispute rates meaningfully. For most local service categories, that is approximately $1,500–$2,500 AUD per month, based on typical category lead costs of $50–$150 AUD per valid lead and a target of at least 15–20 leads per month for quality assessment. In highly competitive verticals (legal, financial advice), per-lead costs are higher, and the viable minimum budget is correspondingly larger.

  Worked example

  LSAs for a Residential Plumbing Business

  • Setup: A Brisbane residential plumbing business charges $220–$450 AUD per service call and handles approximately 60 jobs per month. The business has 47 Google reviews at 4.8 stars, is Google Verified, and serves a 25 km radius of Brisbane CBD. The owner previously ran Search campaigns at a $58 AUD CPA for phone call leads (using a 60-second call duration conversion).
  • Numbers: Average job value is $335 AUD. At a 38% gross margin, gross profit per job is $127 AUD. At a close rate of 70% from phone enquiry to booked job, the maximum sustainable CPL is $127 × 0.70 = $89 AUD per phone lead, before overhead allocation. The business sets a daily budget of $80 AUD ($2,400 AUD/month). At a category lead cost estimated at $65–$75 AUD per valid lead, the budget should yield approximately 2,400 ÷ 70 = 34 leads per month. At 70% close rate, that is approximately 24 booked jobs, generating 24 × $127 = $3,048 AUD gross profit against $2,400 AUD spend — a 1.27x return on gross profit before overhead, viable because the fixed cost base is already covered by existing job volume.
  • Decision: Launch LSAs in Google Ads at $80 AUD/day ($2,400 AUD/month), service categories set to Plumbing, Drain Cleaning, and Hot Water Systems, service area set to 25 km radius of Brisbane CBD. Dispute any lead that is outside the service area or for a service category not offered, targeting a dispute rate below 10%.
  • Why: The gross profit ceiling of $89 AUD per lead supports the estimated $65–$75 AUD category lead cost with an $14–$24 AUD buffer per lead, and the 47-review profile is strong enough to rank competitively without needing to win a keyword auction.

  App Campaigns

  How App Campaigns Work

  App campaigns are designed specifically to drive app installs, in-app registrations, purchases, subscriptions, or other defined in-app actions. Google’s automation distributes ads across Search, Google Play, YouTube, Discover, and the GDN, using the app’s metadata, creative assets, and conversion signal to optimise delivery.^[11] Advertisers do not select placements, keywords, or audiences manually; instead, they provide creative assets (text, images, videos, HTML5 assets) and a target cost per install or target cost per in-app action, and Google manages the rest.

  When App Campaigns Are the Right Choice

  • Your primary commercial objective is app installs or in-app actions, not website leads or ecommerce revenue.
  • You have clean app conversion tracking through Firebase or a supported MMP (mobile measurement partner).
  • Your app has enough in-app conversion events to provide Google’s system with learning signal (typically at least 10 in-app events per day at the campaign level).

  Upsides

  • Full automation reduces manual management burden for multi-surface app acquisition.
  • Access to all of Google’s inventory from one campaign simplifies app marketing that would otherwise require separate campaigns for each surface.
  • Optimises toward downstream in-app events (not just installs) when conversion data is sufficient, reducing install-to-action drop-off waste.

  Downsides

  • Very low transparency into where spend is going across placements and inventory types.
  • Performance collapses without clean Firebase or MMP tracking. If the conversion signal is noisy, the automation learns the wrong behaviour at scale.
  • Not appropriate when the business goal is website conversion — App campaigns optimise strictly to in-app outcomes and will not drive meaningful website traffic or leads.
  • Creative refresh is often required more frequently than in Search campaigns, because App campaign creative fatigue can set in quickly across the broad inventory pool.

  Trade-offs Versus Other Campaign Types

  App campaigns are the right tool only when an app is the product. They are not a substitute for Search, PMax, or Demand Gen for website-based conversion goals. If a business has both a website and an app, these campaign types should run in separate campaigns with separate budgets and separate attribution windows to avoid cannibalisation and measurement confusion.

  Minimum Viable Monthly Budget

  There is no published Google minimum for App campaigns, but the practical threshold is budget sufficient to generate at least 10 in-app events per day at the campaign level for tCPA optimisation to function. At typical Australian category install costs of $3–$8 AUD per install and post-install event rates of 20–40%, that often requires a minimum of $3,000–$5,000 AUD per month to produce enough in-app event volume for stable automation. Sub-threshold budgets should use Maximise Conversions bidding without a tCPA target until volume is established.

  Worked example

  App Campaign for a Fintech App Targeting First Deposit

  • Setup: A Sydney-based personal finance app charges no fee for download but monetises through a subscription at $12.99 AUD per month. LTV at 8-month average retention is $103.92 AUD. The marketing team defines “first deposit or savings goal created” as the primary in-app conversion event, with an expected rate of 32% of installs completing this step within 7 days. The business can sustain a maximum $33 AUD cost per first deposit (= $103.92 LTV × 32% event rate is the wrong calculation here; the sustainable CPA per first-deposit event is 103.92 × 0.40 net margin = $41.57 AUD contribution per subscriber × 32% event rate = not how to set it; correct calculation: max spend per subscriber = $41.57 AUD; to get one subscriber, need 1 ÷ 0.32 = 3.125 first-deposit events, so max cost per first-deposit event = $41.57 ÷ 3.125 = $13.30 AUD — but the team sets tCPA at $18 AUD per first-deposit event to allow headroom in the learning phase).
  • Numbers: Budget set at $4,500 AUD/month. At $18 AUD tCPA per first-deposit event, the campaign targets 4,500 ÷ 18 = 250 first-deposit events per month. At 32% event rate, this implies 250 ÷ 0.32 = 781 installs per month. At $103.92 LTV and 40% net margin per subscriber, 250 first-deposit events × 1 subscriber per event (assuming each first-deposit becomes a subscriber) × $41.57 AUD = $10,393 AUD contribution against $4,500 AUD spend = 2.3x return. The $18 AUD tCPA target leaves a $23.57 AUD buffer per subscriber before the channel becomes unprofitable.
  • Decision: Launch App campaign with tCPA $18 AUD per first-deposit in-app conversion event, budget $150 AUD/day ($4,500 AUD/month), with Firebase tracking verified for the first-deposit event before campaign launch, and a 30-day review gate at which tCPA is adjusted if actual CPA comes in below $14 AUD for 7 consecutive days.
  • Why: The $18 AUD tCPA is 35% above the maximum sustainable $13.30 AUD to give the system learning headroom; the 30-day review gate prevents budget waste if the system over-delivers below target.

  Summary: Local and Other Campaign Types at a Glance

  Campaign type	Best for	Not for	Key trade-off	Min viable monthly budget (AUD)
  Local Services Ads	Eligible local service businesses wanting pay-per-lead billing	eCommerce, brand awareness, non-local, non-eligible categories	Simplicity and lead billing vs. zero keyword or copy control	$1,500–$2,500
  App campaigns	App install and in-app action acquisition	Website leads, ecommerce, brand awareness	Full automation across surfaces vs. very low transparency	$3,000–$5,000

  12. Building Your Campaign Mix and Account Structure

  The right campaign mix is not a product of preference — it is a function of business model, conversion volume, budget, and measurement quality. The most common mistake in Google Ads account architecture is launching too many campaign types simultaneously before any single type has proven its unit economics. The correct approach in 2026 is to start with the campaign type closest to existing purchase intent, prove it, then layer outward.^[1][4][12]

  Campaign Mix by Business Type

  Lead Generation Businesses

  For businesses that sell through enquiry, consultation, or quote — professional services, B2B, healthcare, education, home services — the campaign mix should be anchored in Search, because that is where purchase intent is most explicit and lead quality can be assessed against query content.^[1][4] Broader campaign types should be added only after the Search foundation is proven.

  Campaign type	Role in mix	Budget allocation	When to add
  Brand Search	Defend brand, capture navigational intent	10–15% of total	From day one if brand search volume exists
  Non-brand Search (high intent)	Primary acquisition engine	50–65% of total	From day one
  Performance Max	Incremental lead volume at scale	15–25% of total	After 50+ conversions/month in Search and offline lead quality import established[4][11]
  Demand Gen	Prospecting and remarketing for demand creation	10–20% of total	After Search is profitable and creative assets are ready

  For lead gen accounts spending less than $5,000 AUD per month, the answer is almost always simpler: Search only, consolidated into as few campaigns as needed to produce 30–50 conversions per month per campaign. Adding PMax or Demand Gen at this budget level typically fragments the conversion signal and slows learning rather than accelerating it.^[4][6]

  eCommerce Businesses

  For ecommerce, the primary campaign type is Shopping-led — either Standard Shopping or Performance Max depending on catalog size and conversion volume — with Search for brand and high-intent category queries, and Demand Gen for prospecting and creative-led remarketing.^[1][6][14]

  Campaign type	Role in mix	Budget allocation	When to add
  Performance Max (feed-led)	Primary sales engine across Google surfaces	50–65% of total	From launch if feed quality is high and 30+ monthly conversions available[2][11]
  Brand Search	Protect branded demand, prevent competitor conquesting	10–15% of total	From day one if brand search volume exists
  Standard Shopping	High-margin product isolation, brand product control	10–20% of total	When PMax is running and you need to ring-fence specific SKUs
  Demand Gen	Prospecting, creative remarketing, audience expansion	10–20% of total	After PMax is profitable and creative assets are ready
  Non-brand Search	Category intent capture for high-value queries	5–15% of total	Where specific high-value search terms justify separate control

  Local Service Businesses

  For local service businesses, the mix is the most concentrated: Search and LSAs (where eligible) should take the majority of budget, because purchase intent is the dominant value driver and awareness campaigns typically cannot justify their cost at local budgets.^[1][6]

  Campaign type	Role in mix	Budget allocation	When to add
  LSAs (if eligible)	Pay-per-lead local intent capture	30–50% of total	From launch if eligible; run alongside Search, not instead of it
  Non-brand Search	Service keyword intent capture with landing-page control	35–50% of total	From day one
  Brand Search	Protect business name searches	10–15% of total	From day one if brand search volume exists
  Performance Max	Incremental local lead volume	0–15% of total	Only after Search is profitable and local conversion tracking is robust

  Concrete Budget Allocation by Spend Level

  Monthly budget (AUD)	Business type	Recommended mix
  $2,000–$4,000	Lead gen	100% non-brand + brand Search in one or two campaigns. No PMax or Demand Gen.
  $2,000–$4,000	eCommerce	80–90% Performance Max (feed-led), 10–20% brand Search.
  $2,000–$4,000	Local service	50% LSAs (if eligible), 40% non-brand Search, 10% brand Search.
  $5,000–$12,000	Lead gen	55% non-brand Search, 15% brand Search, 20% Performance Max (if 50+ monthly conversions), 10% Demand Gen remarketing.
  $5,000–$12,000	eCommerce	55% PMax, 15% brand Search, 15% Standard Shopping (high-margin SKUs), 15% Demand Gen.
  $5,000–$12,000	Local service	35% LSAs, 45% non-brand Search, 10% brand Search, 10% PMax.
  $12,000+	Lead gen	45% non-brand Search, 12% brand Search, 25% Performance Max, 18% Demand Gen.
  $12,000+	eCommerce	45% PMax, 12% brand Search, 15% Standard Shopping, 20% Demand Gen, 8% non-brand Search.
  $12,000+	Local service	30% LSAs, 40% non-brand Search, 10% brand Search, 20% PMax + Demand Gen split.

  Preventing Campaign Cannibalisation

  Cannibalisation occurs when two campaign types compete for the same conversion, inflating reported results while actual incremental conversions remain flat or decline. The three most common cannibalisation scenarios in 2026 are Performance Max absorbing brand Search traffic, PMax absorbing non-brand Search traffic, and Demand Gen claiming credit for conversions driven by Search.^[11]

  PMax and brand Search cannibalisation: Performance Max can serve on branded queries unless you actively separate them. The standard protection is to maintain a dedicated brand Search campaign with exact match and phrase match for your brand terms, and ensure that brand keywords are listed in the PMax campaign’s negative keyword list (applied at the account level, since PMax does not have standard keyword exclusions). In practice, this means using account-level brand exclusions where available, or working with your Google representative to apply brand exclusions to the PMax campaign specifically.^[11]

  PMax and non-brand Search cannibalisation: Search campaigns generally receive priority over PMax when the search query closely matches a keyword in the Search campaign, but this prioritisation is not absolute. If Search campaigns are under-invested relative to PMax and conversion volume migrates to PMax, apparent ROAS may rise in PMax while Search volume drops — a measurement artefact, not a genuine efficiency gain. The solution is to actively monitor Search impression share and query volume, and to use campaign-level search term reports (where available for PMax) and the Search Insights feature to audit overlap.^[11]

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