Google Ads guide 2026: how to run search ads that sell

How Google Ads works in 2026

Every time someone searches, Google runs an auction between the advertisers whose ads match that search. It ranks them on Ad Rank: what each advertiser is prepared to pay, how relevant and useful the ad and landing page are, and the expected lift from extras like sitelinks and prices. You pay when someone clicks, and usually less than your maximum, because you only pay enough to hold your spot.

Most accounts no longer set those bids by hand. Smart Bidding sets a bid for every auction from signals you can’t see, like device, location, time of day and what the person has searched recently, and aims it at the goal you pick: more sales, or sales at a target cost or return.

Why search is different from social

On Meta and TikTok you interrupt people who weren’t looking. On Google they come to you, already searching for the product, the problem or your brand. That intent is why search converts so well. It’s also why it’s easy to waste money on, because plenty of those searchers were going to buy from you anyway.

Google handles close to nine in ten searches in Australia, and more than nine in ten on phones.

Where your search ads show now

• Search results. Above and below the free results, as always.
• AI Overviews. The AI summary at the top of many results. Ads have appeared inside them in Australia since late 2025.
• AI Mode. Google’s conversational search. Ads reached AI Mode in Australia on 28 October 2026. Existing Search, Shopping and Performance Max campaigns are eligible automatically, there’s no opt-out, and the results are blended into your normal reports. The searches still appear in your search terms report.

In AI Mode, broad match, AI Max and Performance Max can match to the whole conversation. Exact and phrase keywords are only being tested there, for searches with clear buying intent. That’s one more reason the old exact-match-only approach is getting harder to hold onto.

The Google Ads campaign types an eCommerce brand needs

Google offers more campaign types than most stores need. For an online store, this is the order we’d use them in:

Search

Text ads on the searches you choose with keywords. The core of this guide, split into brand and non-brand.

Shopping and Performance Max

Product ads built from your product feed, and usually the biggest earner for eCommerce on Google. Our Google Shopping guide covers both.

Demand Gen and YouTube

Video and image ads across YouTube, Discover and Gmail. Worth adding once search is profitable and you want to create demand, not just catch it.

Display

Banner ads across websites and apps. For eCommerce it’s mostly remarketing, and easy to waste money on. Last on the list.

Start with brand search, non-brand search and Shopping. Add the others once those are profitable and you have the creative to feed them.

If you still run Dynamic Search Ads, Google is retiring them. From February 2027 they move automatically into AI Max (chapter 08), and you can’t create new ones.

How to set up Google Ads and conversion tracking

Bad tracking is the most expensive mistake in Google Ads, because Smart Bidding spends your money based on it. Get this right before you spend anything meaningful.

1. Create the account with your business details, Australian dollars and the right time zone. Australian accounts are billed with 10% GST on top of ad spend.
2. Install the Google tag. On Shopify, the Google & YouTube app does it. Otherwise use Google Tag Manager.
3. One purchase conversion, counted once. Make purchase the primary goal, with its value, and check no old tag or GA4 import counts the same sale twice. Add-to-carts can be tracked as secondary, but they should never steer bidding.
4. Turn on enhanced conversions. It’s one account-level setting now. It sends hashed customer details with each purchase so Google can match more sales back to clicks.
5. Link GA4 and Merchant Center, so Google Ads sees your products and you can compare the numbers.
6. Upload a customer list. Google needs at least 100 active matched members to use it. It’s how Google tells new customers from returning ones (chapter 09).
7. Check your location setting. Target people in or regularly in Australia, not people who are only interested in it.
8. Review auto-apply recommendations. Switch off anything you didn’t choose, so Google can’t add keywords or change bids without you.

Google Ads keywords and match types in 2026

A keyword tells Google which searches you want to show for. The match type decides how loosely Google reads it.

Broad match has been the default since 2024, and all of Google’s AI features lean on it. It can work well, but only when your purchase tracking is clean and the account has enough sales for Smart Bidding to learn from. Without that, broad match spends on loosely related searches while it works things out.

How we’d start

Start non-brand search on exact and phrase keywords for the products and categories that already sell. Once a campaign converts steadily, around 30 sales a month or more, test broad match or AI Max against it as a proper experiment rather than switching over.

Read the search terms report every week

Keywords are what you bid on. Search terms are what people actually typed. The search terms report is where you find the searches wasting money and the ones worth adding as keywords. It now also shows which searches came through AI Max and Performance Max.

Negative keywords

Negatives stop your ads showing on searches you don’t want. For eCommerce the usual ones are jobs, free, DIY, second-hand, repairs, wholesale and brands you don’t stock. You can add up to 1,000 negatives at account level, plus shared lists of up to 5,000 each.

Google Ads account structure for eCommerce

The old advice was dozens of tightly themed ad groups. With Smart Bidding, fewer campaigns with more sales in each usually win, because each one has more data to learn from.

Brand

Your brand name and its misspellings, on exact and phrase. Always its own campaign.

Non-brand: categories

One campaign, or one per category if the margins or targets are very different. Ad groups by category, like “linen sheets” and “duvet covers”.

Non-brand: problems

Searches that describe the need rather than the product, like “cooling sheets for hot sleepers”.

Competitors (optional)

Searches for other brands. Expensive and low-converting for most stores, so test it last, on its own budget.

Only split a campaign when the parts need a different budget or target. Every split divides the sales Smart Bidding learns from.

Should you bid on your own brand name on Google?

Brand campaigns always look like your best campaign: cheap clicks, a high conversion rate and a huge ROAS. That’s because most of those people were already on their way to you. The real question is how many of those sales your free listing just below would have caught anyway.

We usually do bid on brand, when:

• Competitors are bidding on your name.
• Your free listing sits below ads, Shopping results or an AI Overview.
• You want control of the message, like a sale or a new launch.

How to keep it honest

• Report it separately. Keep brand in its own campaign and never let its ROAS prop up the account total.
• Exclude your brand from AI Max and Performance Max. Use brand exclusions, or they’ll quietly take the cheap brand traffic and look better than they are.
• Test it. Pause brand ads in some regions for a few weeks and compare total sales. That shows what brand ads actually add.

Non-brand search is where Google grows the business: new people finding you through what you sell. Judge it on its own numbers.

How to write Google search ads that win

Search ads are now responsive search ads. You give Google up to 15 headlines of 30 characters and 4 descriptions of 90 characters, and it tests combinations for each search.

Make every headline say something different

• The product, in the words people search
• Price, or “from” price
• Delivery speed and your free shipping threshold
• Returns
• Proof: reviews, ratings, customer numbers
• The offer
• What makes you different

Fifteen versions of the same line give Google nothing to test.

Pin sparingly

Pinning forces a headline into a set position. Google’s own advice changed in June 2026 to match what we’d already been doing: pin one or two essential headlines at most, like your brand or a compliance line, and let the rest rotate. Keep in mind that AI Max’s final URL expansion ignores pins.

Assets

Add sitelinks to your main categories, callouts (free shipping, Australian made, 30-day returns), structured snippets, price and promotion assets, and images. They make the ad bigger and count towards Ad Rank.

The landing page does half the work

Send searches for a product to that product, and category searches to the category, not the homepage. Google’s Quality Score (1 to 10, from expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience) is a diagnostic rather than part of the bid, but a low one usually points to a weak landing page or a gap between the search and the ad.

AI Max for Search: should you turn it on?

AI Max is Google’s bundle of AI features for search campaigns. It came out of beta in April 2026 and has four parts:

Search term matching

Shows your ads on searches beyond your keywords, based on your ads, landing pages and site. In practice, keywordless.

Text customisation

Writes new headlines and descriptions from your site and existing ads, steered by an AI Brief you write.

Final URL expansion

Sends each click to the page Google thinks fits best instead of the landing page you chose. It overrides pinned headlines.

Controls

Brand inclusions and exclusions, URL inclusions and exclusions, and locations of interest.

You may already have it

On 1 September 2026 Google switched parts of AI Max on in campaigns that used automatically created assets or the old campaign-level broad match setting. If you didn’t turn those settings off beforehand, check your campaigns. Dynamic Search Ads move across from February 2027.

How we test it

Google’s headline results for AI Max come mostly from non-retail advertisers, so treat them as a reason to test rather than proof it works for a store. For an eCommerce account we:

1. Run it as an experiment against the existing campaign for about four weeks, rather than switching over.
2. Start with final URL expansion off, or limited to product and category pages, so clicks don’t land on blog posts or the About page.
3. Add brand exclusions so it can’t claim your brand traffic.
4. Write the AI Brief with the claims you can and can’t make, so the generated text stays accurate.
5. Read the AI Max rows in the search terms report every week and add negatives.

Keep it if it brings new, profitable sales from searches your keywords weren’t reaching. Watch for it taking credit for searches your exact and phrase keywords would have won anyway.

Google Ads bidding strategies and budgets

Google renamed the last two in June 2026. Older guides call them “maximise conversions with a target CPA” and the ROAS equivalent.

Set targets from your break-even

Work out your break-even ROAS from your margin first: the break-even ROAS calculator does it in a minute. Set the target close to what the campaign achieves now, then move it in steps. A target far above reality just stops the campaign spending.

Since August 2026, a campaign that’s limited by its budget aims at its target rather than beating it. A campaign with a $40 target CPA that’s running at $25 may drift towards $40 to spend the budget, so set targets you’re genuinely happy to hit.

How learning works now

Google rewrote its Smart Bidding guidance in October 2026. The “Learning” status never lasts more than seven days, and changing the budget, target, ads or targeting no longer triggers it. Performance still takes one to two conversion cycles to settle, so judge any change over two conversion cycles or two weeks, whichever is longer.

Budgets

Give each campaign enough daily budget to buy a few sales a day. We work to at least three to five times the target cost per sale. A budget that only allows one sale a day gives Smart Bidding too little to learn from.

Bid for new customers

Google’s new customer acquisition goal lets a search campaign bid higher for new customers, bid only for new customers, or bid higher for high-value new customers. It needs purchase tracking and works best with a customer list uploaded (chapter 03).

Exploration

Smart Bidding Exploration lets a target ROAS campaign accept a lower return on some searches to find new ones. It’s opt-in. Use it when non-brand growth has stalled and you can afford the test, not as a default.

How much do Google Ads cost in Australia?

There’s no minimum spend. You set a budget and pay per click, and each click’s price comes from the auction, so it varies by category, season and competition. Australian accounts are billed in Australian dollars with 10% GST on top.

There’s no reliable Australian benchmark for search costs: most figures online are US data. Work it out from your own numbers:

The example is illustrative, not a benchmark. Get real click costs from Keyword Planner or a two-week test. Brand clicks are usually far cheaper than non-brand, which is another reason to report them apart.

How much should you start with?

Enough for each campaign to buy a few sales a day at your target cost (chapter 09), rather than a round number. The ad budget calculator works backwards from your revenue goal.

Measuring what’s really working

• Brand and non-brand apart, always. One blended ROAS hides whether Google is growing the business.
• New customers. Is Google finding new customers, or recycling the ones you already have?
• Profit, not revenue. Gross profit against ad spend, by campaign.
• Search terms, weekly. The fastest way to find waste and new keywords.
• MER. Total revenue divided by total ad spend across every channel. Google and Meta both take credit for the same sale; MER doesn’t double count.
• Holdout tests. For brand campaigns and AI Max, pausing in some regions and comparing tells you what they really add.

The MER calculator works out your break-even and target MER from your margins.

Common Google Ads mistakes

• Counting purchases twice. An old tag plus the Shopify app makes every campaign look profitable.
• Bidding on add-to-carts. Smart Bidding finds people who add to cart, not people who buy.
• Letting brand hide non-brand. A blended ROAS that looks fine while non-brand loses money.
• Broad match or AI Max on thin data. Loose matching with too few sales to learn from.
• Final URL expansion left on. Clicks landing on pages that don’t sell.
• The homepage as the landing page. Send people to the product or category they searched for.
• Too many campaigns. Each one starved of data.
• Targets far above reality. The campaign stops spending.
• Changing things every few days. Judge over two weeks at least.
• Recommendations nobody chose. Auto-applied changes you didn’t review.

Where search fits with your other channels

Search catches demand that already exists. Meta and TikTok create it in the first place, and when they’re working, your brand and product searches rise. Our Meta ads guide and TikTok ads guide cover that side, and the Google Shopping guide covers the product ads that sit next to your search ads. Judge the whole mix on MER, because every platform takes credit for the same sale.

Google Ads quick-start checklist

Run your own account against these twelve before you scale. Your ticks are saved on this device.

Thanks for reading, and I hope that helps. If you’d rather hand it over, this is how we run Google Ads for eCommerce brands. And if you just want a second pair of eyes on your own account, that’s what the call is for.

Sam Despo

Founder & Director, Pulp Digital