-
Your understanding is mostly right… PMax does spray budget across low intent placements and most advertisers use it thoughtlessly because Google pushes it hard and lazy account management is the industry standard unfortunately.
The real answer IMO in 2026 is neither PMax nor Standard Shopping alone… it’s a hybrid where Standard Shopping wins high intent auctions through better Ad Rank control while PMax handles discovery and retargeting across YouTube and Display. Google actually changed priority rules in late 2024 so now whichever campaign has higher Ad Rank wins the auction instead of PMax automatically dominating.
For ecom clients I manage this hybrid setup consistently… one client spending $180K+ on Google saw ROAS jump from 2.3x to 3.6x after splitting Standard Shopping for proven bestsellers and isolating PMax purely for new product discovery and retargeting.
Standard Shopping campaign captured high intent searches at lower CPCs while PMAX found incremental revenue from audiences who weren’t actively searching yet.
For your tennis racket example Standard Shopping with tight negative keywords is probably cleaner… PMax needs 30-50 conversions monthly minimum to actually optimize properly otherwise it’s just burning budget while the algorithm figures itself out.
Most people running PMax on low volume accounts are basically paying Google tuition fees while getting mediocre results.
