standard Shopping is sitting on limited by budget. PMax is showing 2.1 ROAS. My gut says neither number means anything yet.

running a clothing store with around 14,000 SKUs, and about two weeks ago I launched a Standard Shopping campaign to get things moving.

Standard Shopping right now:
Budget $50/day
Running about 2 weeks
10 purchases
0.5 ROAS
Showing limited by budget
Manual CPC

About a week in, I started spotting which products were actually converting and moved those into a PMax campaign.

PMax right now:
Budget $50/day
Running 8 days
9 purchases
2.1 ROAS
Max conversion value

So PMax is running circles around Standard, except 8 days and 9 purchases is not data, it's a vibe, and I know it.

three directions i keep going back and forth on:

Option 1, keep Standard at $50/day as a pure testing and discovery node. move the products that sell into PMax and scale that budget as the data builds.

option 2, move basically the whole catalog into PMax because the ROAS looks better.

Option 3, run both, raise Standard since it's limited by budget, and scale PMax at the same time.

The two things I genuinely can't decide:

Standard is limited by budget but sitting at 0.5 ROAS. Do I actually give it more money or leave it where it is?

PMax is at 2.1 after 8 days. Start scaling now, and how aggressively?

Someone in the thread made a good point that the 2.1 vs 0.5 gap means almost nothing at 10 and 9 purchases, because one extra conversion flips the whole story. Their advice was to go with option 1 but sharpen it. Segment the Standard campaign by product type or margin tier instead of one giant pool, use it strictly for discovery, and don't touch the budget just because of that limited by budget flag. the flag fires whenever Google thinks it could spend more, not when it would spend it well.

On PMax they said hold steady another week or two, then scale in 30 to 50 percent steps once there are 30+ conversions and the tROAS target sits at or above breakeven.

One thing that stuck with me: check the checkout before pushing more spend. At $50/day a payment error or a dead discount code is just annoying. at real scale it quietly eats the ROAS you're trying to read. i ended up building a checkout analytics app for Shopify over exactly this, flagging failed payments, broken buttons, invalid codes, so you can separate a traffic problem from a checkout problem.

Then I asked what the criteria should be for graduating a product from Standard to PMax, since Standard is manual CPC and PMax is max conv value.

The short version back: don't move on ROAS alone, move on signal. Once a product has banked enough conversions in Standard that PMax has something to learn from, say 15 to 30 conversions over the last month, and its ROAS has held above target for a few weeks, it's earned a seat. until then it stays in Standard as a discovery sandbox, which is genuinely the best use of manual CPC Standard. with 14k SKUs, migrate in batches, never wholesale. And never let both campaigns bid on the same product at the same time, or they split the signal and neither one reads clean.

The last one is the part that worries me. Make sure conversion value tracking is clean before trusting PMax, because max conv value is only as good as the data you feed it.

so that's where I'm. Standard as the discovery layer, PMax as the scale layer, and a catalog of 14,000 products I'm supposed to graduate 15 to 30 conversions at a time.