The two main Google Ads formats work differently: search catches existing demand with text, while PMax shows products with a photo and price across all Google placements. We explain the difference without jargon – and why the answer is most often "both, in the right proportion".
How they work
A text ad for a specific query: a person searches for "buy a bicycle kyiv" and sees your headline and text. You manage keywords, negative keywords and ad copy by hand. It is strongest where wording matters: services, complex products, branded queries.
A campaign built on the product feed: Google itself shows your products with a photo and price in Search, Shopping, YouTube, Gmail and the Display Network. The algorithm learns from conversions and finds buyers on its own. It is strongest for a catalog: hundreds of products are advertised with no manual work.
Head to head
In practice
Most of the store budget goes into Shopping campaigns: the hottest traffic, automatic scale, the lowest cost per order.
Branded queries (so competitors cannot intercept them), top categories with high margins, services and products that need consultation, where the text decides.
The starting point is ~70/30 in favor of PMax, then the numbers dictate the split: we check the cost per order of every campaign and shift budget to where it is lower.
We will set up a PMax + search combination for your catalog: feed, Merchant Center, conversions, branded campaign. Every month you get a report with the cost per order for each format.
📝 Get an ad launch planFree consultation. We will suggest the right split for your niche
