Performance Max for webshops in Denmark: a setup that doesn't eat your budget

For most online stores, Performance Max is the campaign that spends the biggest share of the Google Ads budget. It is also the campaign I hear the most complaints about: "it spends on our brand", "it buys cheap Display traffic", "I have no idea what it does with the money". Most of the time the problem is not Performance Max, but how it was set up. Below is the setup I use for webshops selling in Denmark, step by step, so it doesn't eat your budget. What Performance Max actually does Performance Max (PMax) is a single campaign that shows your products and ads across every Google network: Shopping, Search, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps. You give it the products in your feed, the creative assets, audience signals and a goal. The algorithm decides where, to whom and how much to bid. That means PMax is exactly as good as the data you feed it. If tracking counts the wrong things, if the feed has weak titles or if the goal is "as many sales as possible" with no profit limit, the campaign will optimise for exactly that. Before the campaign: the 3 foundations 1. Correct tracking The purchase conversion must send the real order value, excluding the 25% Danish VAT and shipping, and it must be deduplicated. Ideally you also use Enhanced Conversions. Consent Mode v2 has to be set up properly, because a large share of Danish visitors decline cookies and without consent modelling the campaign learns from incomplete data. I explain why in the guide to server-side tracking and the article on Consent Mode v2 . 2. A clean feed In PMax, your Merchant Center feed is effectively the copy of your Shopping ads. Titles, images, prices in DKK and availability must be correct and complete, and titles should be written in Danish, the way Danes actually search. I collected the most common problems in the article on Google Merchant Center feed mistakes . 3. Margin per product Without margin you cannot set a sensible target and you cannot separate profitable products from the ones…