Campaign types and where ads appear

Campaign type decides which inventory you buy, which controls you get, and — increasingly — how much of the decision-making you hand over. Choosing wrongly is a more expensive mistake than any bid setting.

The intent types

Search — text ads against queries. The person is actively looking. Highest intent, highest CPC, most control. This is where "demand capture" happens.

Shopping — product listings driven by your merchant feed rather than keywords. For retail, the feed is the targeting; product titles and attributes do the work keywords do elsewhere.

The interruption types

Display — banners across the web. Cheap, huge reach, low intent. Useful for remarketing, dangerous as a prospecting default.

Video / YouTube — awareness and consideration. Creative-led.

Demand Gen — Google's answer to paid social: visually-led ads across YouTube, Discover and Gmail, aimed at creating demand rather than capturing it.

The automated composite

Performance Max runs across every channel at once — Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube, Discover, Gmail, Maps — from a set of assets, a budget, a goal and optional audience signals. You do not choose placements or, mostly, keywords.

PMax works well when conversion tracking is accurate and there is enough conversion volume to learn from. It behaves badly when it can cannibalise your existing branded search and report the resulting conversions as its own. Brand exclusions exist precisely for this.

Choosing

Start where intent already exists. For most businesses that means Search, plus Shopping if you sell products. Add demand-generation channels once capture is saturated — measured by impression share, not by feel. Reach for PMax when you have measurement you trust, not as a shortcut around not having it.

What trips people up

• Running PMax first, then being unable to explain what worked.
• Judging Display and Demand Gen by last-click CPA. They are not last-click channels.
• Ignoring that Shopping quality is feed quality.

You have got this when

You can say, for a given business, which campaign type you would start with and what evidence would justify adding the next one.