How Google’s latest Performance Max updates are turning your product feed into one of your biggest competitive advantages.

When most retailers think about improving Google Ads performance, they tend to focus on budgets, bidding strategies or creative. Our last blog post was based on exactly this. However, given that one of the biggest opportunities in 2026 is your Google Merchant Centre feed, we thought it worthy of a standalone article.

Google’s latest updates to Performance Max and Merchant Center reporting reinforce a clear message. Your product feed is no longer just a catalogue of products powering Shopping ads. It has become one of the most important data sources that Google’s AI uses to determine which products to show, who to show them to and where they should appear across Google’s advertising ecosystem.

At Silvertip Digital, we work exclusively with e-commerce brands, and we’re increasingly seeing Merchant Center become just as important as campaign structure itself. Retailers with well-optimised product data are giving Google’s AI better information to work with, leading to stronger visibility, higher-quality traffic and ultimately more profitable growth.

When Performance Max first launched, one of the biggest concerns for retailers was the lack of visibility. Google’s AI was deciding where to spend budget across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps, but advertisers had very little insight into which products were succeeding on which channels or why.

For many e-commerce brands, this meant trusting the algorithm while having limited evidence to support merchandising, budgeting or creative decisions.

That is beginning to change.

Throughout 2026, Google has introduced a series of reporting enhancements that provide far greater transparency into how Performance Max campaigns perform. Most notably, recent updates to the Google Ads API now enable much richer reporting for retail campaigns, giving advertisers access to product-level and channel-level performance that simply wasn’t available before.

From June 2026, Google has expanded product reporting so that retailers can analyse performance across all Performance Max networks, rather than just a subset. This means products can now be evaluated across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps within a much more consistent reporting framework.

Instead of viewing Performance Max as a single campaign with a single ROAS figure, retailers can begin to understand how individual products perform across Google’s ecosystem. This provides much richer commercial insight into where products are gaining visibility, where they generate conversions and which channels contribute most effectively to profitable growth.

Google has also expanded reporting for every campaign type that uses a Google Merchant Center feed. Whether products appear through Performance Max, Shopping, Demand Gen or Video campaigns, reporting is becoming increasingly consistent, allowing retailers to compare product performance more accurately across channels.

Google Merchant Center is more than just a product catalogue.

it has become one of the most valuable marketing assets within the Google Ads ecosystem.

Performance Max relies heavily on Merchant Center data to determine which products should be shown, who they should be shown to and how they should be presented. Product titles, descriptions, images, pricing, availability, GTINs, custom labels and product categories all help Google’s AI understand your catalogue and match products with relevant customer intent.

As Google provides more detailed reporting, retailers are no longer limited to optimising campaigns at campaign level. They can increasingly optimise their catalogue itself.

Retailers can identify:

• Products that consistently outperform across different Google channels.
• Product categories that generate high click volume but poor conversion rates.
• High-margin products that deserve greater budget allocation.
• Seasonal ranges that benefit from dedicated campaigns or asset groups.
• Underperforming products that may require stronger imagery, revised titles or more competitive pricing.

This shifts optimisation away from simply adjusting bids and budgets towards improving the overall quality of the product catalogue.

Your product feed is becoming your competitive advantage

Google’s own guidance for retail Performance Max campaigns makes it clear that retailers should think carefully about how they structure asset groups and product feeds. Rather than placing an entire catalogue into a single asset group, Google recommends grouping products logically and supporting each group with relevant creative assets.

At Silvertip Digital, this reflects how we’ve always approached Performance Max for B2C brands. We don’t see Merchant Center as simply a feed that powers Shopping ads—we see it as the foundation of every successful retail campaign.

A well-optimised feed allows Google’s AI to make better decisions from the outset. That means writing product titles that reflect how customers actually search, using high-quality imagery that showcases products effectively, enriching product attributes and using custom labels to segment products by seasonality, profitability or promotional activity.

When combined with accurate conversion tracking and strong first-party data, these improvements give Google’s AI significantly better signals to optimise towards.

Better Reporting Leads to Better Decisions

Perhaps the most important change isn’t the reporting itself—it’s what retailers can now do with it.

Instead of asking, “Is my Performance Max campaign working?”, brands can begin asking much more commercially valuable questions:

• Which products are driving profitable growth?
• Which categories deserve additional investment?
• Which creative assets are helping products convert?
• Which channels are contributing incremental revenue?
• Which products should be promoted more aggressively during peak trading periods?

These are merchandising questions as much as advertising questions.

As Performance Max continues to evolve, the retailers that outperform won’t necessarily be those with the biggest budgets. They’ll be the brands with the strongest product data, the clearest measurement framework and the ability to use Google’s increasingly rich reporting to make better commercial decisions.

For specialist B2C agencies like Silvertip Digital, this represents an exciting shift. Performance Max is no longer just an automated advertising platform.

it is becoming an increasingly intelligent retail growth engine, giving e-commerce brands the insights they need to optimise not only their campaigns, but their entire merchandising strategy.

Sources 

Retailer Best Practices for AI-powered Performance Max Campaigns (Google Ads Help)
https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/11546049

Performance Max for Online Sales with a Product Feed (Google for Developers)
https://developers.google.com/google-ads/api/performance-max/retail

How Asset Groups Work (Google Ads Help)
https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/10724748