Should you Advertise all Your Products in Google Ads or Only Some?

If you’re marketing an ecommerce brand with Google Ads, the biggest challenge you’re probably facing is how to increase sales volume without compromising efficiency. Can you grow sales and maintain the cost per conversion and return on ad spend?

That is the million dollar question. Literally.

You’ve probably also head of the Pareto principle. It states the 80% of your outcomes result from 20% of your causes. Does the same principle also apply to your products and sales.

Your Best and Worst Selling Products

You know your products better that I do (I don’t know your products at all yet). However, I am guessing that your have best sellers. A bunch of products that bring in an unproportional share of your revenue.

You probably also have a lot of slower moving SKUs. Products that never really managed to resonate with your audience. You could have stocks your trying to move and products that you need to bundle with others.

If you look at a pie chart of your sales by product you’ll probably see your best sellers stand out immediately. In fact, you probably know them by heart already.

If your revenue is unevenly distributed between your products in this way, you probably shouldn't be distributing advertising spend evenly between all your products.

Product sales percentages. The actual brand has over 200 products and notice how one product is responsible for over a fifth of all sales.

The Difference Between Google Ads Best Sellers and Actual Best Sellers

So, should you be putting most of your spend on your best selling products?

Possibly, but not so fast. Conversions in Google Ads can be different from your Shopify report. Here’s why.

How Google Assigns Conversions & Conversions Value to Products

In Google ads, when you see that product had a conversion it doesn't actually mean that this product is the one that was bought. What it actually means is this is the product that was shown in the ad and clicked on resulting in a sale.

For example, someone might have clicked on an ad for a cheap accessory and ended up buying a bunch of more expensive products.

When you look in your report, you'll see the accessory assigned with a conversion and a conversion value for all the products that were actually purchased.

The product that brought in the click responsible for the sale is the one that gets the credit for the sale. Not the actual products bought.

Not All Best Sellers Work Well in Google Ads

There are other factors affecting sales in Google ads. You might have a killer product that is getting lots of sales on paid social and through PR. However, the way people search for products might mean that they are not aligned to buying your best selling product.

This is especially true when your product doesn't exactly match the expectation of the searcher.

A classic example might be when you have a product that is priced above the benchmark for its category. Or when your product offers a different alternative to existing products, people are searching for.

Sometimes the search intent just isn't fully aligned to your product despite it being a strong seller on your store.

These types of products usually require additional education to bring the customer on board.

Does Google’s Automation Know How to Distribute Spend Between Products?

The answer is simple: No!

You would have thought that with all the sophisticated automation and AI Google would be able to distribute your budget in an optimised way across your products.

Unfortunately, the reality is very different. What we find time and time again is the following:

1. Spend is repeatedly going towards products with low returns.
2. The best selling products are not getting enough spend.
3. Some products are not getting any spend, or they’re getting very little.

This is bad for any ecommerce brand, and it’s usually worse when you have a large number of SKUs.

Splitting Products Into Different Campaigns

If this unoptimised distribution of spend is happening in your account, and it probably is, then you should split your products into different campaigns.

The best way to split the products is usually by performance.

Caution About Splitting Performance Max Campaigns

If you’re using Performance Max campaigns, there can be issues with splitting your existing campaign into smaller ones. pMAX campaigns usually need a minimum of 60 conversions per 30 days optimise. Depending on your account volume, you might not have enough conversions to split a Performance Max campaign.

Pros of Standard Shopping Campaigns for Segmenting Products

We usually recommend using standard shopping campaigns when splitting your products. Here’s why:

1. You can use portfolio bidding strategies with Standard Shopping for shared learning and optimisation across multiple campaigns.
2. You can use manual bidding and maximise clicks bid strategies.
3. Fewer things can go wrong. If the campaigns performs better or worse, it because of the products you’ve added. With pMAX it could be because the algorithm has decided to put some of the spend in display video and all sorts of channels. You never really know what PMAX is going to do when you make changes. With shopping, it's much simpler.

For all these reasons, we prefer the control and clarity that comes with standard shopping campaigns. However, this doesn’t mean we don’t run pMAX, but this will usually be lower spend with a high ROAS target.

Advertising All the Products or Just a Selection?

So, we’ve already established that we don’t want to give the same weight and budget to all the products. We know we want to champion the champions. But what do we do with the rest?

The answer depends on a few factors:

1. Your budget: If you can afford to, it’s a good idea to keep some spend towards your other products. However, your spend on these is controllable and can be reduced or increased based on the returns that you're getting.
2. Seasonality: for many brands certain products sell at certain times of the year. Your best selling products in the winter could be your worst selling products in the summer. If that's the case, you always want to leave some spend on these products to see when they pick up. If your products’ seasonality is clear, then you should consider splitting your campaigns by seasonality too.
3. Stock levels & trends: for many brands, the best selling products run out of stock and only stay around for a few months. If your brand is like this, you wanna leave the door open for other products and not just rely on your current best sellers to carry you on.

Conclusion - Choosing Which Products to Advertise on Google

Putting different budget waiting on your products based on how well they sell can elevate your brand, increase sales and maintain if not improve return on ad spend.

Depending on your situation, you might want to completely pause products that are making a loss. However, where it possible, you might benefit from leaving a little bit of spend on these products.

It's also important to find the products that are getting very little to no spend and make sure that they're getting their fair chance to shine and see if they bring in unexpected sales.

About Effective Marketing UK

We’re a Google Ads specialist digital marketing Agency based in Camden, London. We manage and consult on PPC for ecommerce and lead generation with over 10 years of industry experience. If you’ve have any Google Ads questions, we can probably help.

Odi Caspi - Founder @ EffectiveMarketing.uk