Day one of Shopping in Bulgaria: launch Standard, not Performance Max.
Every guide tells you Performance Max is the default now. In a market that has never had Shopping, on an account with no Shopping history, that advice is backwards. Here is the structure to open with, and when to change it.
Magnet Minds
23 August 2026
7 min read
Assume the feed is clean and Merchant Center is approved. The next question is what campaign you actually turn on, and the honest answer for Bulgaria is not the one most 2026 guides give.
Why a cold market is different
Performance Max is Google's automated, cross-channel campaign type. It works by learning: it needs conversion signal to decide who to show your products to and where. On an established account in an established market, it has plenty to learn from, which is why it now drives a large share of e-commerce conversions and why every guide recommends it.
Bulgaria on day one has none of that. No account has Shopping history in this market, because the format has never run here. Nobody has search-term data for Bulgarian product queries in Shopping. Handing that situation to an automated system and asking it to optimise is asking it to guess, expensively, with your budget.
Start with Standard Shopping
Standard Shopping was not retired. Smart Shopping was, back in 2023, and the two get confused constantly. Standard is fully supported, and for opening a market it does the one thing PMax cannot: it shows you the search terms.
That visibility is the entire point in month one. You find out how Bulgarians actually phrase product searches, which categories pull, which queries are junk, and what a click really costs here. That is data nobody currently has, and it is worth more in the first weeks than the incremental efficiency PMax would buy you once it had learned.
- You see search terms and can add negatives instead of guessing.
- You control bids by product group, so a thin-margin category cannot quietly eat the budget.
- You learn what the market costs before committing to automation that assumes you already know.
When Performance Max earns its place
Once you have four to six weeks of real Shopping data, PMax stops guessing and starts exploiting, which is what it is good at. That is the moment to introduce it, not before.
And when you do, the failure to plan for is brand cannibalization. PMax preferentially buys the cheapest available conversions, and branded searches are the cheapest, because that customer was already coming. Industry analysis puts 8 to 15% of PMax spend on traffic that would have converted anyway, inflating apparent ROAS by 15 to 30%. The campaign looks like your best performer precisely because it is taking credit for demand you already had.
The fix is account-level brand exclusions plus a dedicated brand Search campaign, so brand traffic is bought deliberately and cheaply rather than by an algorithm optimising its own scorecard.
The structure to launch with
- One Standard Shopping campaign, split into product groups by category, not one undifferentiated "All products" bucket. Category-level bids are what stop your cheapest, worst-margin line from absorbing the budget.
- Separate the bestsellers. A small number of products carry most e-commerce revenue. Give them their own group and their own bid rather than averaging them in.
- Manual CPC or a click-focused strategy at first. Conversion-based bidding needs conversions to bid on, and on day one there are none in this market.
- A brand Search campaign from the start, so brand demand is captured cheaply and stays visibly separate from Shopping performance.
- Negatives from week one, in both alphabets. Bulgarian search mixes Cyrillic and Latin constantly, and a negative list in one script leaks in the other.
We set up Merchant Center, clean the feed and have the campaigns sitting paused and ready, so launch day is switching something on rather than starting to build. Talk to us about what that looks like for your catalogue.
Book a 30-min call No payment, no obligation.What to watch in week one
Not ROAS. There will not be enough data for ROAS to mean anything, and reacting to it early is how accounts get broken.
- Search terms, daily. This is the asset you are actually buying in week one.
- Impression share by product group, to see where you are simply not showing up.
- Cost per click against expectation. A market with no competitors should be cheap. If it is not, something in the setup is wrong.
- Disapprovals, because feeds drift and a promotion can silently take a category offline.
Feed not ready yet? That comes first, and it is covered in the feed guide. For the wider timeline see the preparation guide, and we track the launch date here.
Questions
No. Smart Shopping was retired in 2023 and the two are often confused. Standard Shopping remains fully supported in 2026, and most strong e-commerce accounts run it alongside Performance Max rather than choosing one.
Because it optimises from conversion data and on day one in a brand-new market there is none. You would be paying for it to discover what Standard Shopping shows you directly through search terms. Introduce PMax once there are four to six weeks of real data to work from.
They compete on ad rank, not on a priority setting you control. Since October 2024 Google picks the entrant by bid rather than campaign type, which is why brand exclusions and deliberate bid separation matter once both are live.
It depends on catalogue size and category, and anyone quoting a universal figure is guessing. The more useful point is that a market with no competition should produce unusually cheap clicks at launch, so a modest budget buys more learning than the same money will buy six months later.
Be switching it on while everyone else is still reading the docs.
A 30-minute call. We map the campaign structure for your catalogue and tell you what has to be in place before Shopping opens in Bulgaria.
Book the callNo payment, no obligation. You keep the plan either way.