Ecommerce Advertising Channels to Add After Google Shopping

Before adding a channel, check how much room is left inside Google. In our data, most stores lose more search impressions to Ad Rank than to budget. Then add channels in order of how much new work they ask for, starting with Demand Gen, which runs on your existing feed and tracking. Microsoft Shopping and Meta catalogue ads reuse your product data but need their own tag. TikTok, Pinterest and YouTube video campaigns need creative made for each platform. Size every test from your cost per order.

This guide is a map of the paid channels beyond Google Shopping and Performance Max. For each one it answers three questions: what the channel is for, what it takes from your feed, tracking and budget, and where the detailed article is. How far Google itself can still take you is a separate question, answered in the Google Ads growth playbook.

One limit up front. Our data comes from Google Ads accounts, so we measure only the Google side. For Meta, TikTok and Pinterest we have no numbers of our own. This guide compares how they work from their own documentation and quotes no benchmarks for them.

Most stores advertise almost entirely through Performance Max

In our data, almost all of a store’s ad budget goes through one campaign type. Performance Max runs in 141 of 146 stores and takes a median 95.7% of their budget (GetProfit data, 146 stores, June 2025 – June 2026). Every other campaign type is a small addition where it exists at all.

These are observations, not an experiment, so read the table with three caveats. Each median comes only from the stores that run that campaign type, so the rows describe different groups of stores and don’t rank the channels. Shares are counted inside each store, so the five currencies in the sample never mix. And ROAS here is revenue divided by ad spend as Google Ads reports it, not profit, because we have no product costs.

So for most stores, “adding a channel” means stepping outside Performance Max for the first time. Part of what looks new already runs inside it, though.

According to Google’s API documentation (Performance Max), Performance Max allocates budget dynamically across channels including Search, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps. A store on Performance Max can already show up on YouTube and in Gmail. Google, not the store, decides how much of the budget goes there. Our Performance Max guide for online stores explains how the campaign type itself works.

The small rows also need a different reading. Demand Gen, Display and Video are awareness campaigns: their job is to reach people before they search for a product. A purchase-based ROAS shows only part of what they do, so they need a yardstick of their own.

Is there still room inside Google before you add a channel?

A second channel is a way to buy demand you don’t reach yet. Before paying for it, check whether the demand you already reach is used up. Impression share answers that.

Google’s API reference (metrics) defines search impression share as the impressions you received divided by the estimated number you were eligible to receive. It reports the missed ones in two parts: lost because the budget was too low, and lost to Ad Rank.

In our data, the cap is almost always rank. Across 125 stores with at least 120 days of data, the median store won 45.8% of the search impressions it was eligible for. It lost 50.2% to rank and 13.6% to budget. Each figure is a separate median, so they don’t add up to 100%. Of the 119 stores where we could measure both losses, 110 were capped by rank and 9 by budget (GetProfit data, June 2025 – June 2026).

Read this with one limit. Impression share counts only the impressions a store is already eligible for, a pool its catalogue and budget have already narrowed. It is not the size of the market. For Performance Max the measure is incomplete, and for Demand Gen, Display and Video campaigns it isn’t reported at all in our data.

What it means in practice: when rank is the cap, a bigger budget in the same campaigns doesn’t buy the missing impressions. A new channel can then look like the only way up, while the fix for the cap is still inside Google. The article on when a second channel pays off walks through the check step by step.

Which paid channels are there beyond Shopping and Performance Max?

Six options come up for an online store. They differ less in “where the ads show” than in what they reuse from your setup.

Each channel gets a short answer here and a detailed article of its own.

Demand Gen: Google’s channel for reaching people before they search

Demand Gen shows image and video ads on YouTube, including Shorts, and in Discover, Gmail and Maps, according to Google’s API documentation (Demand Gen). By default the ads can also run on the Google Display Network. Channel controls can keep them on Google’s own surfaces only, or narrow them to a single channel such as YouTube Shorts.

With Merchant Center linked to Google Ads, Demand Gen can show products from your product feed, and listing groups decide which products go in. It works on the feed and conversion tracking you already have, so it is the shortest step outside Performance Max. Demand Gen for online stores covers setup and what to fix in Google before launch. The difference in purpose matters as much as the setup: Demand Gen vs Performance Max explains why the two need different yardsticks.

YouTube: three campaign types reach it

A video campaign shows video ads on YouTube and across websites and apps of Google video partners. Demand Gen reaches YouTube too and can carry products from the feed, and Performance Max already serves there as well. So starting on YouTube begins with choosing a campaign type. YouTube ads for an online store compares the three and lists the settings that quietly spend the budget.

Microsoft Shopping: the same search intent on Bing

Microsoft Shopping campaigns show product ads built from the catalogue in your Microsoft Merchant Center store when a search has product intent. Microsoft’s developer guide lists Czechia, Slovakia and Poland among the countries where Shopping campaigns and product ads are available. Ukraine is not on the list.

Microsoft Advertising can import your Google Ads campaigns, once or on a schedule. Its Performance Max is in open beta worldwide.

The import leaves two things behind. The catalogue lives in a separate Microsoft Merchant Center store: Microsoft’s developer guide describes submitting it by file transfer or through its Content API. And Microsoft’s own UET tag on your site counts the conversions: the import can bring your conversion goals across, but they count through that tag. Microsoft Shopping for European online stores covers setup and whether it’s worth it for your country.

Meta: Facebook and Instagram

Meta shows ads to people scrolling Facebook and Instagram rather than searching for a product. For a store, the core format is catalogue-based. Meta’s developer documentation describes Advantage+ catalog ads as catalogue products that Meta serves dynamically as personalised ads, in different formats.

Whether to start with Meta or with Google depends on what you sell. Our comparison of Facebook Ads vs Google Ads shows how to tell from your own products. If Google Shopping already sells for you, the guide to Facebook and Instagram ads alongside Shopping sets the two up to complement each other.

Two narrower questions have their own articles. Advantage+ sales campaigns covers the automated campaign type and which products and customers to keep out of it. Product sets for Meta catalogue ads covers splitting the catalogue by how products perform.

TikTok and Pinterest: catalogues for video and inspiration

Both platforms build catalogue ads from a product catalogue. TikTok lets you create the catalogue in its Ads Manager or connect it through an ecommerce platform such as Shopify, WooCommerce, PrestaShop or OpenCart. Its Smart+ Catalog Ads build a personalised creative for each viewer from that catalogue.

Pinterest sets conditions before a store can use catalogues: a business account, a claimed website and the Pinterest tag installed. The site must also make contact details, a shipping policy and a refund policy easy to find. TikTok and Pinterest catalogue ads covers what your feed and tag must send, and which stores these channels suit.

In what order should an online store add channels?

The steps here rank channels by how much of your setup they reuse, not by how much they will sell. We have no data of our own outside Google, so we can’t rank them by return. A store whose buyers clearly live on Instagram can reasonably start with Meta. For everyone else, each step adds one new kind of work.

1. Use the room inside Google first. If your campaigns lose most impressions to rank, more budget in the same campaigns won’t reach them. A new channel won’t fix that cause either. Work through the levers inside Google before you open a second account.
2. Add Demand Gen if you want to reach people before they search. It needs no new feed, no new tag and no new account. What is new is creative, and a separate way to judge results.
3. Add Microsoft Shopping if you sell in a country on Microsoft’s list. It covers the same kind of search intent as Shopping. You can import the campaigns. What is new is the Microsoft Merchant Center store and the UET tag.
4. Add Meta catalogue ads once you can track purchases there properly. This is a second platform. It has its own catalogue, its own pixel and server events, and its own way of counting orders.
5. Then add YouTube video campaigns, TikTok and Pinterest. They need video or visual creative made for each platform. YouTube runs on your Google Ads conversions, while TikTok and Pinterest each need their own tag on your site.

Each step also adds a budget line and a report to read. Together they make up your media mix: the split of your ad budget between channels. Plan it as a set of jobs, not as a list of platforms. One channel captures demand that exists, another creates it, and each gets its own yardstick.

One feed travels into every catalogue

Every catalogue-based channel in this guide reuses your product feed in Merchant Center. The other platforms ask for much the same product data:

Meta and Pinterest publish lists of required fields. TikTok’s catalogue overview lists what a catalogue holds rather than what is required, so its column shows only that.

Meta’s field reference also asks for the most specific Google product category possible, and its XML feed example uses Google’s g: field prefix. In practice, a clean Merchant Center feed is the natural source for a Meta catalogue. The guide to a Meta catalogue from your feed covers field mapping, connectors, catalogues for several countries and the common rejections.

The weak point is rarely the data format. In our data, 109 of 142 stores had a Merchant Center flag on less than 1% of their catalogue. Among the 400,000 flagged products we looked at, the most common flags were “not eligible in any campaign” and “out of stock” (GetProfit data, 142 stores). Both come from decisions about campaigns and stock, not from broken data.

Stock travels badly between platforms, because a catalogue copy is only as current as its last update. A product that sold out yesterday can still appear in ads from a catalogue that refreshes weekly. Microsoft, for one, asks you to send updated catalogue data at least every 30 days, which is a floor rather than a target. Set every catalogue to refresh as often as your stock changes.

Because every catalogue starts from the same feed, a gap in it repeats on every platform. The portal scores the Merchant Center feed that these catalogues copy. It shows which fields are empty and on how many products, and which products don’t get into ads at all and why (what the feed check covers).

What tracking does each channel need?

Every platform optimises on the purchases reported through its own tracking. A channel without clean purchase tracking learns from noise, so set tracking up before the first test, not after.

Meta recommends a “redundant setup”: the Conversions API sending events from your server next to the Pixel in the browser. Meta then removes duplicates when the event IDs and event names from the Pixel and the server match, within 48 hours of the first event. If the IDs don’t match, one order can count twice. The guide to running Pixel and Conversions API together covers the setup and how to make GA4 read Meta’s traffic correctly.

Microsoft’s UET tag is required for conversion tracking and remarketing in paid search, and one tag can serve all your conversion goals. TikTok recommends events across the whole path, from viewing a product page to adding to cart and buying. Among common setup problems, it lists content IDs that don’t match the catalogue.

One rule holds across all of them. Each platform reports the orders it attributes to its own ads, under its own rules. Add up the platforms’ totals, and you can get more orders than your store received. Your store’s order count is the one number every channel shares.

How should you judge a channel that isn’t Performance Max?

By a yardstick of its own, not by the ROAS you use for Performance Max. A purchase report credits most directly the ads people saw close to buying. A channel whose job is to reach them earlier shows only part of its effect there. So for such a channel, a low ROAS proves neither that it fails nor that it works.

The portal applies this split. Video, Display and Demand Gen campaigns are listed with their spend but are not assessed, and they are not marked down for having no purchases. Their job is reach rather than conversions, so measuring them against Performance Max would mislead.

For channels that do sell directly, a fair target comes from your margin, not from the ROAS Google reports.

Example store, not client data.

A tableware store with 3,000 products spends 40,000 a month on Google Ads and gets 180,000 in revenue from 300 orders. Its ROAS is 4.5, or 450%, and each order costs about 133 in ads. The store keeps 35% of revenue as gross margin.

So any channel breaks even on the first order at a ROAS of 1 ÷ 0.35 = 2.86, or 286%: at that level, gross profit equals ad spend. A new channel reporting 300% clears that line. One reporting 250% loses money on the first order, unless its buyers come back.

A different target for each channel is normal. Our guide to splitting an ad budget between channels sets them from margin and from each channel’s job.

The harder question is incrementality: would those orders have come anyway? A Meta or YouTube campaign can also lift searches for your brand and products, so some of its effect shows up as Google Shopping sales. A platform’s own report can’t show that, but switching the channel off for a while and watching your total orders can. The guide to checking the cross-channel lift covers that test and how not to fool yourself with it.

Some store owners who come to us split the work. An agency keeps campaigns such as Demand Gen and YouTube, and someone else runs the product campaigns. That works when both sides agree on how to judge each channel and look at the same order count from the store.

How much should a first test of a new channel cost?

Size the test from your cost per order, not from a round sum. Decide in advance how many orders you need to see before you judge the channel, and when you stop.

Example store, not client data.

A tableware store spends 40,000 a month on Google Ads and pays about 133 in ads per order there. Suppose a new channel’s cost per order starts at twice that, 266, and the store wants to see 30 orders before deciding. The test then needs about 30 × 266 = 7,980, roughly a fifth of its monthly Google budget. A test of 2,000 would buy about 7 orders at that cost, too few to judge either way.

In Google Ads, an ad campaign is the unit that holds a budget, a goal and a bidding strategy. So a Demand Gen test can run on a budget of its own and leave your Performance Max untouched. On other platforms the test is a separate account altogether. Our guide to budgeting a new channel test works out the amount, the test length and the stop rule.

What to do this month

1. Read your impression share. In your Search, Shopping and Performance Max campaigns, compare the share lost to rank with the share lost to budget. If rank dominates, put the next month into the levers inside Google before opening a new channel.
2. Separate your awareness campaigns in reports. Keep Demand Gen, Display and Video out of the ROAS you use for product campaigns, and judge them on their own terms.
3. Check your feed before it goes anywhere else. Fill empty fields, fix availability, and make sure the IDs in the feed are the ones your site and tags use.
4. Pick the next channel by what it reuses. Demand Gen needs no new feed or tag, only creative. Microsoft Shopping needs a Microsoft Merchant Center store and a UET tag, and only makes sense in a country on Microsoft’s list. Meta needs a catalogue and a Pixel, with the Conversions API recommended next to it.
5. Install tracking before the first test. Confirm that the new platform records purchases with their value, and that each order counts once.
6. Set the test budget from your cost per order. Write down the number of orders you need and the date you will decide.
7. Report total orders from your store. Never add the platforms’ reported orders together.

See what Google doesn’t see in your catalogue. The portal goes through your Merchant Center feed and shows which fields are empty, on how many products, and what that does to impressions. The portal changes nothing without your consent.

Check your feed →

Sources

• Performance Max | Google Ads API — Performance Max allocates budget dynamically across channels including Search, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps. Checked 2 October 2026.
• metrics | Google Ads API — definitions of search impression share, search budget lost impression share and search rank lost impression share. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Demand Gen | Google Ads API — Demand Gen serves on YouTube, including Shorts, Discover, Gmail and Google Maps, and works with product feeds. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Channel controls | Google Ads API — Demand Gen channels (YouTube in-feed, in-stream and Shorts, Discover, Gmail, Display, Maps): all channels including Display by default, Google-owned channels only, or individual channels. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Demand Gen campaigns with product feeds | Google Ads API — Merchant Center must be linked to Google Ads; listing groups decide which products serve. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Video campaigns | Google Ads API — video ads on YouTube and across websites and apps of Google video partners; the page doesn’t mention product feeds. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Product Ads - Microsoft Advertising API — Microsoft Shopping campaigns use the Microsoft Merchant Center store catalogue, serve on searches with product intent; country list includes Czech, Slovakia and Poland, not Ukraine; catalogue submitted by FTP/SFTP or Content API. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Performance Max Campaigns - Microsoft Advertising API — open beta worldwide; UET tag required; retail campaigns need a Microsoft Merchant Center store; send updated catalogue data at least every 30 days. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Google Ads Import - Microsoft Advertising API — importing Google Ads campaigns into Microsoft Advertising, now or on a schedule. Checked 2 October 2026.
• GoogleImportOption Data Object - Microsoft Advertising API — conversion goals can be imported from Google Ads and are tied to a UET tag. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Universal Event Tracking - Microsoft Advertising API — one UET tag on every page; prerequisite for conversion tracking and remarketing in paid search. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Catalog — Meta’s developer documentation: a catalogue holds your product inventory and powers Advantage+ catalog ads, served dynamically as personalised ads in different formats. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Catalog Fields — Meta’s required product fields; the most specific Google product category; XML example with Google’s g: prefix. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Handling Duplicate Pixel and Conversions API Events — Meta’s redundant setup of Pixel and Conversions API; deduplication by event ID and event name within 48 hours. Checked 2 October 2026.
• About catalogs | TikTok Ads Manager — catalogues in Ads Manager or through partners such as Shopify, WooCommerce, PrestaShop and OpenCart; Smart+ Catalog Ads. Checked 2 October 2026.
• About TikTok Pixel | TikTok Ads Manager — the pixel measures traffic and campaign performance and optimises campaigns; recommended events from product page view to purchase. Checked 2 October 2026.
• How to set up Events and Parameters | Event Builder — content IDs not aligned with the catalogue listed among common setup problems. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Get started with retail catalogs | Pinterest Business help — business account, claimed website, Pinterest tag, contact, shipping and refund details; required catalogue fields. Checked 2 October 2026.
• GetProfit data: 146 online stores, June 2025 – June 2026 — campaign types, median share of budget and median ROAS by type.
• GetProfit data: 125 online stores with at least 120 days of data, June 2025 – June 2026 — impression share and the shares lost to rank and to budget.
• GetProfit data: 142 online stores — share of the catalogue with Merchant Center flags and the most common flags.
• GetProfit portal — awareness campaigns listed with spend and kept out of the assessment; the feed check.