Performance Max and Shopping RFP: the pack for handing over your product feed and campaigns

Scope this as managing Google Shopping and Performance Max campaigns built off your existing product feed: Merchant Center feed setup and ongoing health, asset group structure, and campaign level goal setting. It assumes you have a product catalog to sell; if you also need product photography, descriptions rewritten, or a new ecommerce platform, name those as separate, priced items.

State whether this RFP includes Merchant Center feed creation and maintenance or whether that already exists and only campaign management is in scope. These are genuinely different skills, and a vendor strong in campaign strategy is not automatically strong in feed troubleshooting, which is a more technical, ongoing task.

Name whether standard Search and Display campaigns alongside Performance Max are also in scope, since some businesses run Performance Max as one part of a broader account, not the whole account.

Grant access to your Merchant Center account and your Google Ads account at an appropriate role level, along with access to whatever platform generates your product feed, Shopify, a custom feed file, or another ecommerce platform. The vendor needs to see the feed's actual structure to diagnose disapprovals or missing attributes.

Provide your margin and average order value by product category if you have it, since a sensible ROAS or target CPA goal cannot be set without knowing what you can actually afford to pay for a sale.

Share any past Performance Max or Shopping performance history, even if the account has been dormant or poorly optimized, so the vendor is working from real account signals rather than starting cold with no data for the algorithm to learn from.

Your Google Ads account and your Merchant Center account should remain under your own billing profile and login throughout, not nested inside a vendor's manager account in a way that makes leaving difficult. Confirm this in writing before work starts, since untangling accounts from an agency's manager account later is its own project.

Ask what happens to the product feed's field mapping and any custom feed rules built during the engagement, campaign level exclusions, custom labels used for bidding structure, and whether those are documented well enough for a new vendor to continue using them.

Require that account level brand exclusion lists and any negative keyword lists applied at the account level, which is where Performance Max controls actually live, are documented and remain visible to you regardless of who manages the account next.

Set a first milestone around feed health: the product feed is approved with a stated disapproval rate below an agreed threshold, before campaign spend ramps up meaningfully. Launching Performance Max on top of a feed with widespread disapprovals wastes budget on a small subset of products that can actually show.

Set a second milestone at thirty to sixty days measuring ROAS or CPA against the target agreed at the start, acknowledging that Performance Max campaigns typically need a learning period before performance stabilizes; the RFP should state what that learning period reasonably looks like for your budget size.

Require a monitoring cadence, not just a monthly report, specifically watching for a spend increase without a matching sales increase, since this pattern can develop within days and a monthly-only check catches it too late to limit the damage.

Weight feed and platform specific knowledge heavily: 25 percent for a specific plan to maintain Merchant Center feed health, 20 percent for how they propose to structure asset groups around your actual product catalog, 20 percent for how a ROAS or CPA target will be set and adjusted, 15 percent for price, and 20 percent for references with a comparable catalog size or spend level.

A proposal promising granular keyword level control inside Performance Max, rather than acknowledging its real, more limited control surface, is either inexperienced with the platform or overselling what it can deliver.

Ask references directly whether they experienced a runaway spend period under this vendor's management, and if so, how quickly it was caught and what changed afterward.

Every bidder should answer these in writing before their proposal is scored: What is your process for keeping our Merchant Center feed approved and healthy on an ongoing basis? How do you structure asset groups for a catalog like ours? Given that Performance Max lacks keyword level negatives, what account level controls do you actually use, and how? How do you monitor for a spend increase without a matching sales increase, and how quickly would you catch one?

Also ask how they set an initial ROAS or CPA target for a new account with limited history, since a target set purely from generic benchmarks rather than your own margin data can misprice the campaign from day one.