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Client told me Google shopping (via Pmax) is a scam
Posted by on December 26, 2025 at 5:54 pmI’ve been running Google Ads for an e-commerce client for about five years. Recently, as costs started increasing, he brought in a marketing agency for a second opinion.
Their conclusion was blunt: Google Ads is losing you money. Stop the campaigns and your revenue won’t drop.
He did stop them — and indeed, revenue didn’t drop.
That raises a real question. Over the past five years, we averaged a ROAS of ~5 with around €2,000/month in ad spend.
So what’s actually happening here? Are Google Ads numbers misleading, inflating performance to keep advertisers spending? Or is there a more nuanced explanation for why revenue appears stable after shutting campaigns down?
Genuinely curious to hear insights from people who’ve seen similar situations.
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1 Reply
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Wait again few days and you will see a drop.
Users often came back on the website after few visits to convert. Not the first visit.
Organic Search traffic and Direct traffic are not free or magic traffic. They are the result of marketing effort like ads.
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Do you split branded and non-branded campaigns?
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Keep us posted on the duration of your test. Also curious to hear more on this.
How many products / SKUs does the ecomm store have? And how many orders? (Before vs after) -
😂
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If that 5x was mostly on their brand name, very possible they won’t see a huge drop. Or it might takes a few weeks or months before they see a drop. The drop doesn’t always happen right away because it depends on what type of customers Google Ads has been bringing into the business.
Also, you don’t say how conversion tracking was set up and how long ago you turned off the campaigns. Both of those pieces of information and context could help people give you a better answer. For most ecom brands, Google ads is a great investment and not a waste of money… if the campaigns are run in the right away. Any paid ads could be a waste but I would be curious to know what the marketing agency said the brand should do instead to acquire customers.
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If you don’t use negative brand lists agains PMAX campaigns, ROAS and conversion value numbers will always be inflated no matter what.
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There are definitely companies who make most of their sales without paid ads (very niche, high brand awareness, low competition). However like others have said duration of test matters. When you take your foot off the gas your car still coasts a while before coming to a stop.
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Sounds like the buys were heavy RET/REM and not ACQ. Expecially PMAX—-> that placement is very heavy REM, you need to run as ACQ and make it earn its keep earning new customers not heavy REM.
Looks like they were returning customers regardless and your ads were pushing that along.
This is why I run heavy search on terms for ACQ audiences—-keep that ACQ funnel coming in. I’m able to prove this on last click—-> back tracking to first click attribution.
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Your client should measure incremental conversions
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Shopping ADs PMax didn’t work for me. I had a lot of traffic but not a single conversion.
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As others have said – the drop off is coming.
The only caveat is if an inordinately high amount of your ad spans was on branded traffic.
We’ve taken over a lot of accounts where PPC numbers looked great, until you look deeper and see the vast amount of conversions were coming from branded keywords.
Not saying that’s the case here, but it’s worth looking into – if a second agency came with the conclusion that it was best to turn ad spend off, that might be the main reason why.
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