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Zero results – help greatly appreciated!
Posted by on April 19, 2026 at 3:39 pmHi All,
First post here, looking for some wisdom after lurking for a while!
I have a bed and mattress e-commerce site based in Ireland/Northern Ireland, selling divan sets, Ottoman beds, upholstered beds and mattresses at competitive prices. It's not a hugely competitive market compared to the UK, and I know colleagues in this space who are getting strong results from PPC and Meta ads.
I initially paid someone to set up Google Ads for me. They ran a Shopping-only PMAX campaign, citing high purchase intent as the reason. After burning through around £400 with zero conversions, I took matters into my own hands. Over the last few days I've added full assets to both campaigns, including headlines, descriptions, images, sitelinks and brand guidelines, and fixed what turned out to be a broken conversion goal (it was set to Add to Basket rather than Purchase).
They also had "maximise conversion value" despite no conversions, and I've changed this to "maximise conversions" instead.
Current setup is two PMAX campaigns targeting ROI (EUR) and NI (GBP) separately, both at £20/day, both showing as Eligible. Products range from around £100 upwards, so spending £600+ with nothing to show for it is hard to stomach. Is the budget too low? Quite a low CPC.
I understand Google needs time to learn and gather data, but I'm now around 3 weeks in with zero conversions recorded. A key competitor in the Irish market is doing north of 100 conversions per week, though they've been established for a few years.
The site is clean, professionally built on WooCommerce with good product images and competitive pricing. I've placed test orders myself to confirm checkout works, including with interest free finance options.
Is this normal for a new PMAX campaign? What would you look at next? Happy to share more details if helpful. Search campaigns instead?
Thanks in advance, and sorry for the long post.
P.S – results from one campaign shown for reference, although they are virtually the same.
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1 Reply
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Happy to take a look at your setup. Gut feeling is you’re throwing a too small budget at too large a group of products, but would need to look at your website too. Feel free to DM me, happy to share credentials there.
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The broken conversion goal explains most of it. Running maximise conversion value when Google had never seen a purchase event means it was optimizing toward nothing for weeks. Smart bidding on e-commerce needs real purchase data to know who buys. Without it, it’s spending blind. Those three weeks of budget taught Google the wrong signal. That historical data is still in the model even now you’ve fixed it. The existing campaigns have been shaped by broken inputs. Starting fresh with new campaigns might give Google a cleaner learning signal than trying to recover what’s there.
The other thing worth checking is that PMAX doesn’t break down which placements are driving clicks. A £0.13 CPC for your niche is very low. Shopping and Search clicks in furniture tend to cost more than that. If a large chunk of those 1.8k clicks is coming from Display or YouTube, that explains the zero conversions. Those audiences are browsing and not buying. There’s also a case for moving away from PMAX entirely for now and running a standard Shopping campaign or a search campaign targeting high-intent terms like “divan bed Ireland” or “Ottoman bed buy online.” PMAX is a black box. Without existing conversion data, it has no real signal to work from. Standard campaigns give you visibility into what’s triggering your ads and what’s converting. What does your product feed look like? Titles and descriptions specifically.
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