Google Performance Max for Marketplaces: How to Drive Amazon Sales With Google’s AI — A Complete Setup Guide
By Search Solutions LLC • June 2026 • 11 min read
For years, sellers building their business on Amazon faced a structural limitation: Google Ads was built to send traffic to your own website, and most marketplace sellers don’t have one — at least not one that matters as much as their Amazon listing. That gap meant an entire universe of high-intent Google searchers was effectively off-limits to Amazon-first sellers, unless they built and maintained a separate ecommerce site purely to capture Google traffic and redirect it to their marketplace listings.
Google closed that gap with Performance Max for Marketplaces — a campaign type that sends Google traffic directly to your product listings on a connected marketplace, no website or Merchant Center account required. For sellers whose business lives on Amazon, this is a genuinely new acquisition channel: Google’s AI-driven reach across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, and Gmail, pointed directly at your existing Amazon catalog.
This guide walks through exactly how the product works, what’s required to set it up, how conversion tracking and optimization actually happen behind the scenes, and what to watch for as you launch your first campaign.
| 56–66% of consumers now start their product search on Amazon rather than Google, per multiple 2026 industry surveys | 45% of all Google Ads conversions now come through Performance Max campaigns as of early 2026 | 60%+ of all units sold on Amazon come from independent third-party sellers — exactly who this campaign type is built for |
What Performance Max for Marketplaces Actually Is
Performance Max for Marketplaces is a distinct campaign type inside Google Ads — built specifically for sellers who sell through a third-party marketplace rather than their own website. As Search Engine Land reported when Google expanded the product, it allows sellers to create Google ad campaigns that send traffic to their product listings on third-party ecommerce platforms, without needing a website or Merchant Center account. After you connect your Google Ads account to a supported marketplace, you can launch fully automated Performance Max campaigns that promote your marketplace product catalog across Google’s advertising channels — Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, and Gmail.
The product launched in beta in May 2024 and has continued to expand its marketplace partner list since. Availability is limited to “select marketplaces” — Google has not published a complete, public list of every supported partner, and access for a given marketplace is something Google has described as an evolving rollout. Given Amazon’s scale as the dominant product-search marketplace in the U.S., it is the marketplace most frequently referenced in coverage of this product, but availability can vary by seller account, region, and current partner status — confirm directly inside your Google Ads account or with your Google representative before building a campaign plan around it.
What makes this meaningfully different from a standard Performance Max campaign: Google’s own help documentation confirms the campaign uses your marketplace’s existing product feed to serve ads — no separate Merchant Center feed required. When a customer clicks your ad, they’re sent directly to your product page on the marketplace to complete the purchase there, inside the environment they already trust.
“You’re not building a Google funnel that competes with your Amazon listing. You’re pointing Google’s entire advertising ecosystem directly at the listing you already have.”
How Conversion Tracking Actually Works — And Why It’s the Most Important Thing to Understand
This is the part of the system that most sellers misunderstand — and it’s worth getting precisely right, because it changes how you should think about campaign setup. Conversion tracking for Performance Max for Marketplaces campaigns is configured and reported by the marketplace itself — not by you, and not through a manual import process. Once your Google Ads account is connected to the marketplace, the marketplace sends conversion data back to Google automatically, attributing sales to whichever seller’s ad drove the click.
Critically, this attribution is scoped narrowly and accurately: only sales of your own products are counted as conversions. If a shopper clicks your ad and then buys a different seller’s product on the same marketplace, that sale is not attributed to your campaign and does not appear in your Google Ads reporting. This is a meaningful protection — it means the conversion signal feeding Google’s AI is genuinely tied to your business outcomes, not inflated by marketplace-wide activity your ad happened to trigger.
Once that conversion data starts flowing back into Google Ads, Smart Bidding takes over — the same AI-driven bidding engine that powers every Performance Max campaign. The system uses the accumulating sales data to learn which queries, placements, audiences, and creative combinations are actually producing marketplace sales, then shifts budget and bids toward what’s working. This is the self-optimizing loop: real sales data flows in from the marketplace, the algorithm adjusts based on that signal, and performance compounds as the data set grows — typically requiring 30 to 50 conversions before the system has enough signal to optimize reliably.
If your Google Ads account has standard conversion goals already configured — from website tracking on a separate property, for example — those goals will also appear as available options when you build a Performance Max for Marketplaces campaign. Google strongly recommends manually removing those account-default goals from this campaign so it optimizes exclusively toward the marketplace-reported conversions it was built for. Leaving a generic goal attached muddies the signal the algorithm is learning from.
Step-by-Step Setup
Here’s the practical sequence for getting a Performance Max for Marketplaces campaign live, based on the current process documented by Google:
Confirm marketplace eligibility. Inside your seller account, check whether your marketplace currently supports linking to Google Ads. Because this is a select-partner rollout, availability can vary — your marketplace’s seller support team can confirm current status.
Link your Google Ads account to the marketplace. This requires sending a connection request from your marketplace seller account during initial setup. Once approved, your Google Ads account gains access to your marketplace’s product catalog and conversion reporting.
Create a new campaign and select your goal. In Google Ads, start a new campaign and choose Sales as your objective — the most common fit for marketplace sellers. Select Performance Max as the campaign type, then choose your linked marketplace account as the destination when prompted.
Review and confirm conversion goals. Google will display the conversion goals the marketplace has configured on your behalf. Confirm these, and — as noted above — remove any unrelated account-default conversion goals so the campaign optimizes purely toward marketplace sales.
Set your bidding strategy. If you’re tracking conversion values — meaning different products generate different revenue — Google recommends the “Maximize conversion value” bid strategy. If all conversions matter equally to you regardless of order size, “Maximize conversions” is the simpler starting point.
Confirm your listing groups. By default, all products in your linked marketplace account are eligible to appear in ads. If you want to focus spend on a subset of your catalog — your highest-margin SKUs, for example — use the listing group editor to select by category, brand, item ID, or product type rather than running every product simultaneously.
Build your asset group, then launch. An asset group isn’t required since the campaign pulls product images and copy directly from your marketplace feed, but adding supplementary headlines, descriptions, and logo assets can improve reach and performance. Confirm your settings, review the campaign summary, and submit.
What’s Different From a Standard Performance Max Campaign
If you’ve run a standard Performance Max campaign before, several familiar features aren’t available in the Marketplaces version — worth knowing up front so you’re not troubleshooting a missing setting that was simply never built for this campaign type:
No Final URL expansion. Standard PMax can find and test new landing page URLs automatically. Marketplace campaigns send every click directly to your marketplace product page — there’s no destination flexibility to expand.
No video assets or automatically created assets. You can supply supplementary images, headlines, descriptions, and a logo, but video creative isn’t supported for this campaign type at this time.
No cross-account conversion tracking. Since conversion measurement is owned entirely by the marketplace, this campaign type isn’t compatible with cross-account conversion configurations the way standard PMax campaigns can be.
No new customer acquisition modeling or audience data segments. The richer first-party audience tooling available in standard PMax campaigns isn’t part of the marketplace version — the campaign relies primarily on product feed signals and Smart Bidding’s broader intent modeling.
Why This Matters for Amazon-First Sellers Specifically
The strategic case for this campaign type rests on a real shift in consumer behavior. Multiple 2026 surveys put the share of consumers who now start their product search on Amazon, rather than Google, somewhere in the 56–66% range — meaning a majority of product discovery has already migrated away from traditional search. That’s exactly why this matters: Performance Max for Marketplaces doesn’t try to win shoppers back to Google before sending them to Amazon. It meets them on Google with intent-matched ads and routes them straight into the Amazon environment where they’re already comfortable converting.
For the majority of Amazon sellers — third-party sellers account for over 60% of all units sold on the platform — this closes a gap that previously required either ignoring Google entirely or investing in a parallel ecommerce site purely to capture search traffic. A seller running a clean product catalog on Amazon can now access Google’s Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, and Gmail inventory without that overhead, using infrastructure they’ve already built.
It’s also worth noting that this arrives at a moment when Performance Max as a campaign type is doing the heavy lifting across Google’s entire advertising platform — accounting for roughly 45% of all Google Ads conversions as of early 2026. The same AI infrastructure, audience modeling, and Smart Bidding engine that’s driving that share is what powers the marketplace version of the product.
Best Practices for the First 30 Days
Performance Max campaigns of any type need a learning period before judging results, and the marketplace version is no exception. A few practical guidelines for the first month:
Don’t apply an aggressive Target ROAS on day one. Start with Maximize Conversions or Maximize Conversion Value with no strict target, and let the campaign accumulate data. Setting a tight cost constraint before the algorithm has learning data tends to throttle delivery and slow the entire ramp-up.
Budget for enough volume to actually learn. Campaigns that can’t generate meaningful click volume per day will take significantly longer to exit the learning phase and produce inconsistent results in the meantime. Sizing your budget to support real daily traffic — not the absolute minimum — pays off in how quickly the algorithm stabilizes.
Make sure your marketplace listings are ready for paid traffic before you launch. Performance Max controls where and how aggressively your ads bid — it has no influence over what happens after the click. Strong product images, complete and accurate listing copy, competitive pricing, and a healthy review profile all directly affect whether the traffic this campaign generates actually converts on the marketplace side.
Monitor regularly, but resist constant changes. Every meaningful adjustment to budget, bid strategy, or listing groups restarts part of the algorithm’s learning process. Review performance weekly, but make deliberate, infrequent changes rather than reacting to day-to-day fluctuations — especially in the first month.
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