Should you split Performance Max campaigns for your Shopify store?
In most cases, I would only separate products when there is a clear commercial reason, such as different margins, budgets, ROAS targets or seasonality
Quick Answer
Most Shopify stores do not need a separate Performance Max campaign for every product category.
I normally split products into different campaigns only when there is a clear commercial reason, such as different margins, budgets, ROAS targets, seasonality or significantly different product performance.
Creating separate campaigns simply because a store has several product categories can make an account look more organised, but it can also divide the available budget and conversion data between too many campaigns.
The question I ask is simple:
Does this group of products need its own budget, bidding strategy or commercial objective?
If the answer is no, I usually question why it needs a separate campaign.
Running one large Performance Max campaign across an entire Shopify catalogue can sometimes feel too broad.
You may have expensive products mixed with cheap products. Best sellers competing with slow-moving inventory. High-margin categories sharing budget with products that barely make money.
The obvious solution appears to be splitting everything up.
One campaign for furniture.
Another for lighting.
Another for accessories.
Another for clearance.
Another for best sellers.
Another for high-margin products.
Before long, a relatively modest Shopify account can have six or seven Performance Max campaigns fighting over the same advertising budget.
That does not automatically create more control.
Sometimes it creates a more complicated account with less useful data in each campaign.
I manage Shopify and eCommerce Google Ads accounts, and I prefer to keep Performance Max structures as simple as the commercial requirements allow.
I will split campaigns when there is a reason to do it.
I will not split them simply because I can.
Should Shopify stores run one or multiple Performance Max campaigns?
There is no single campaign structure that is right for every Shopify store.
A store selling 40 similar products at similar margins may work perfectly well with one Performance Max campaign.
A retailer selling 4,000 products across very different categories, price points and profit margins may need several.
The mistake is assuming that the number of product categories should determine the number of campaigns.
It shouldn’t.
Campaign structure should follow the way the business needs its advertising budget managed.
Before creating another campaign, I want to know what problem we are trying to solve.
For example:
- Does one category need substantially more budget?
- Does one category have much better margins?
- Are different ROAS targets required?
- Is one range seasonal?
- Is one category consuming budget without producing enough revenue?
- Do we want to protect spend for a strategically important product range?
- Is there enough budget and conversion activity to support another campaign?
If I cannot give a good commercial reason for separating the products, I generally keep the structure simpler.
Why I usually start with a simpler Performance Max structure
Google Ads needs useful conversion information to make bidding decisions.
When you continually divide an account into smaller campaigns, you also divide the available activity between those campaigns.
Imagine a Shopify store generating 100 purchases per month through Performance Max.
One campaign receives information from all 100 purchases.
Split the products across five campaigns and each campaign may now be working with a much smaller portion of that activity.
The split will not necessarily be even either.
One campaign may generate 50 purchases while another receives only five.
That second campaign now has very little information to work with.
This is why I am cautious about over-segmenting smaller accounts.
More campaigns can give an advertiser more control over budgets and targets, but there needs to be enough activity behind each campaign for that control to be worthwhile.
When I would split Shopify products into separate PMax campaigns
There are several situations where separate Performance Max campaigns can make good sense.
1. Products have very different profit margins
Revenue is not the same as profit.
A campaign can appear to have a good ROAS while allocating a large amount of spend to products that produce relatively little margin.
Suppose one Shopify store sells:
- furniture at strong margins
- branded appliances at very thin margins
- accessories at very high margins
Treating all three categories identically may not make commercial sense.
The business may be able to tolerate a lower ROAS on high-margin products while needing a much stronger return from low-margin inventory.
Separate campaigns can give us greater control over those objectives.
The important point is that I would be separating them because of their economics, not simply because they sit in different Shopify collections.
2. Categories need different ROAS targets
Different product groups can justify different bidding targets.
Perhaps one category is highly profitable and the business wants aggressive growth.
Another may have expensive fulfilment costs and needs tighter profitability.
Putting both inside the same campaign can make that difficult to control.
A separate campaign can allow each group to work towards a different return target.
Again, the question is not:
“Are these different categories?”
It is:
“Do these categories need to be managed towards different outcomes?”
That distinction matters.
3. One category needs its own budget
This is one of the clearest reasons to create another campaign.
If an important product range needs guaranteed access to advertising spend, placing it inside a campaign containing hundreds of other products may not give you enough budget control.
Google decides where spend goes within the campaign.
That can mean a category the business considers strategically important receives very little traffic.
Separating the category gives it its own campaign budget.
I see this as a far stronger reason for splitting a campaign than simply wanting cleaner reporting.
4. Seasonal products behave differently
Seasonal inventory is often a good candidate for separation.
Christmas products are an obvious example.
A retailer may sell homewares all year but introduce hundreds of Christmas products for several months.
Those products have a completely different sales cycle.
Demand rises rapidly, peaks, then falls away.
The business may also want to increase the Christmas advertising budget progressively as the season approaches without affecting its normal evergreen products.
In that situation, I would strongly consider keeping seasonal products in their own Performance Max campaign.
It gives us clearer budget control and prevents the seasonal range from competing directly with the normal catalogue inside the same campaign.
5. Best sellers are being starved of budget
Not every product receives equal exposure through Performance Max.
Sometimes Google finds a group of products it likes and concentrates spend there.
That is not automatically a problem. Those products may genuinely be the strongest opportunities.
But occasionally valuable products receive very little exposure because other parts of the catalogue are consuming most of the budget.
If a commercially important group of proven products consistently struggles to receive spend, separating it may be worth testing.
I would still investigate why the products are receiving limited traffic first.
Feed quality, pricing, competition, product titles, availability and historical performance can all play a role.
A new campaign should not be used to hide an underlying product feed problem.
When I would NOT split the campaigns
There are also several reasons I regularly reject proposed campaign splits.
“We have six Shopify collections”
That alone tells me almost nothing.
Shopify collections are useful for organising a website.
They do not automatically represent the best Google Ads structure.
If six categories have similar margins, similar performance and the same commercial objective, six separate campaigns may achieve little.
“It will make reporting easier”
I would not restructure a functioning advertising account purely to make a report look tidier.
There are other ways to analyse product and category performance.
Campaign structure should improve advertising decisions, not just spreadsheet presentation.
“Google recommends more campaigns”
Recommendations inside Google Ads should be considered, not automatically accepted.
I want to understand what the change achieves for the business before implementing it.
Google Ads is very good at encouraging advertisers to change things.
My job is deciding whether the change actually makes sense.
“We want more control”
More control sounds good, but control only helps when there is something meaningful to control.
If a new campaign has hardly any budget, very few conversions and exactly the same ROAS objective as the existing campaign, you may have created more administration rather than more control.
Low-budget Shopify stores need to be particularly careful
The smaller the advertising budget, the more cautious I am about creating lots of campaigns.
Suppose a store spends $100 per day.
Splitting that into five campaigns could theoretically leave each campaign working with around $20 per day, although actual spending will vary.
That may be nowhere near enough for certain product categories, particularly when individual products have relatively high prices.
You can end up with an account containing beautifully organised campaigns that barely generate enough activity to make useful optimisation decisions.
I would rather have a simpler structure producing meaningful information than an elaborate structure producing very little of it.
Asset groups versus separate Performance Max campaigns
This is another area that causes confusion.
An asset group is not the same thing as a campaign.
Creating separate asset groups can be useful for organising products, messaging and creative themes inside a Performance Max campaign.
For example, an outdoor furniture retailer might have asset groups for:
- outdoor dining
- outdoor lounges
- umbrellas
- accessories
That does not necessarily mean each category needs its own campaign.
I generally consider a separate campaign when I need campaign-level control over something meaningful, particularly budget or bidding objectives.
If I mainly need better organisation, product grouping or category-specific creative, an asset group may be enough.
How I make the decision in a real account
I don’t split campaigns because a spreadsheet tells me the store has eight product categories.
I first look at how those categories actually behave.
I want to know:
- Are the margins significantly different?
- Are conversion rates different?
- Does one category consume a disproportionate amount of spend?
- Does one category need a different ROAS target?
- Is one seasonal while the others sell throughout the year?
- Are certain products strategically important to the business?
- Is there enough budget to support another campaign?
- Is there enough conversion activity for the new campaign to make useful bidding decisions?
- Are feed problems causing the performance difference?
- Could the same objective be achieved using asset groups instead?
If there isn’t a clear reason for giving a group of products its own budget or bidding strategy, I normally question why it needs its own campaign.
Complexity needs to earn its place.
An example of how I might structure a Shopify account
Imagine a homewares retailer selling:
- furniture
- cushions and accessories
- Christmas decorations
- clearance stock
I would not automatically create four campaigns.
After looking at the numbers, I might discover:
Furniture and accessories have similar profitability and sell consistently throughout the year.
Christmas has a completely different sales cycle and needs aggressive budget increases between September and December.
Clearance products have lower margins and the business does not want them consuming budget that could go towards full-price stock.
A sensible structure might therefore be:
Campaign 1: Core products
Furniture and accessories.
These products share the normal ongoing budget and profitability objective.
Campaign 2: Christmas
Christmas inventory only.
This allows the budget and bidding strategy to be adjusted independently as seasonal demand increases.
Campaign 3: Clearance
Only if there is a genuine business reason to advertise the clearance range separately.
If there isn’t, I may exclude the products altogether rather than create another campaign simply to accommodate them.
That leaves us with two or three campaigns instead of automatically creating one for every category.
The account is still controlled, but it hasn’t been unnecessarily fragmented.
Don’t ignore the product feed
Campaign structure gets a lot of attention, but it is only one part of Performance Max.
Before rebuilding campaigns, I also look closely at the Shopify product feed and Google Merchant Centre.
Poor titles, weak product types, incorrect attributes, disapprovals, pricing issues and missing product information can all affect Google Shopping visibility.
Splitting an underperforming product group into a new campaign will not magically repair weak product data.
This is why I look at Performance Max, Merchant Center and the product feed together rather than treating them as separate problems.
If your Performance Max campaigns are spending without producing the return you expect, my Performance Max consulting service covers campaign structure, product performance, Merchant Centre, feeds and tracking.
Campaign structure should follow the business, not the Shopify menu
This is probably the simplest way to think about it.
Your Shopify navigation might contain 12 collections.
That does not mean you need 12 Performance Max campaigns.
Google Ads campaign structure should reflect things such as:
- profitability
- budgets
- bidding objectives
- seasonality
- product performance
- strategic priorities
Sometimes that produces one campaign.
Sometimes it produces three.
For a very large retailer, it could produce considerably more.
There is no prize for having the most complicated Google Ads account.
The best structure is the simplest one that gives the business the control it actually needs.
Before splitting an existing Performance Max campaign
If an existing PMax campaign is performing reasonably well, I would not start tearing it apart without understanding what is currently driving the results.
Before making a major structural change, I would review:
- Product-level spend and revenue
- Category performance
- Conversion tracking
- Merchant Center health
- Product feed quality
- Current ROAS and profitability requirements
- Budget limitations
- Existing campaign overlap
- Seasonal changes
- Whether the proposed new campaigns will have enough activity
This is particularly important if the campaign already has useful historical performance.
A rebuild should solve a known problem.
“Maybe this structure will work better” is not enough reason for me to dismantle a campaign that is already generating profitable sales.
If you’re unsure whether your account has genuine structural problems, I offer a Google Ads audit for Shopify stores where I look for wasted spend, tracking problems, campaign overlap, feed issues and other problems before recommending changes.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should every Shopify category have its own Performance Max campaign?
No. Different Shopify categories do not automatically require separate campaigns. I normally separate products when there is a meaningful reason to control their budget, bidding strategy, profitability target or seasonality independently.
How many Performance Max campaigns should a Shopify store have?
There is no ideal number. Some stores may only need one Performance Max campaign, while larger retailers with different margins, product ranges or seasonal requirements may benefit from several. The structure should reflect the commercial requirements of the business rather than an arbitrary campaign number.
Is one Performance Max campaign better than several?
Not necessarily. A single campaign can concentrate conversion data and keep management simpler, while multiple campaigns can provide more budget and bidding control. The right choice depends on product economics, advertising budget, sales volume and business objectives.
Can I split best-selling products into their own PMax campaign?
Yes, but I would first establish why the split is needed. If proven best sellers are not receiving enough spend or require their own budget or ROAS target, separation may make sense. If they are already performing strongly inside the existing campaign, changing the structure may not achieve much.
Should seasonal Shopify products have a separate Performance Max campaign?
Often, yes. Seasonal ranges such as Christmas products can justify their own campaign because budgets, demand and bidding requirements can change significantly throughout the season.
Should high-margin products have their own PMax campaign?
Potentially. If high-margin products can support a different ROAS target or the business wants to invest more aggressively in them, a separate campaign can provide additional control. Margin differences need to be commercially meaningful enough to justify the extra structure.
Can too many Performance Max campaigns hurt performance?
Too many campaigns can fragment the available budget and conversion activity, particularly in smaller accounts. More campaigns are not automatically better. Each additional campaign should have a clear purpose.
Should I use asset groups instead of separate campaigns?
Asset groups can be useful when products need different creative, messaging or organisation but do not require separate budgets or bidding objectives. I usually consider separate campaigns when I need genuine campaign-level control.
Should I rebuild a Performance Max campaign that is already working?
Not without a good reason. If a campaign is generating profitable sales, I would first understand what is working and identify the specific problem a rebuild is supposed to solve. Major structural changes should have a clear commercial justification.
Can you review my Shopify Performance Max campaign structure?
Yes. I work directly with Shopify and eCommerce businesses on Performance Max, Google Shopping, Merchant Center, product feeds and conversion tracking. I can review the existing structure and tell you where I believe changes are justified and where I would leave things alone.
Is Your Shopify Performance Max Structure Helping or Hurting?
If your account has accumulated multiple Performance Max campaigns and you’re no longer sure which products should be running where, I can review it.
I look at the campaign structure, product performance, Merchant Center, feed quality and conversion tracking together.
I won’t recommend rebuilding campaigns simply to make the account look different.
I’ll tell you what I think should stay, what should change and where your advertising budget may be getting wasted.
Request a free Google Ads waste check
No obligation. Just a practical review of what is happening in the account.
Phil works directly on every account, with no junior account managers or offshore handovers. His focus is practical: reduce wasted ad spend, fix tracking and product feed problems, and improve profitable sales.
Learn more about Phil Adair or request a free Google Ads audit.
AUTHOR BIO
Phil Adair is a Sydney-based Google Ads consultant with more than 17 years of hands-on experience. He specialises in Shopify and eCommerce advertising, including Performance Max, Google Shopping, Google Merchant Center, product feeds and conversion tracking. He also manages selected Google Ads lead-generation campaigns for service and B2B businesses.