Are you running your Shopping campaign on tROAS?
If so, my latest rather surprising (or maybe not) experience might be of interest to you.
Last week, roughly 35% of the products of one of my clients went out of stock. I wish I could say that was because of me, claim victory, and pop another Veuve Clicquot. Unfortunately, it was a supply-side issue that caused the dramatic decrease in inventory.
Since the Shopping campaigns were still early in the game (we started tROAS bidding 4 weeks ago) and the ROAS targets have yet to be met, the campaigns are running on a fixed budget. And then suddenly, the smart AI had one-third of the products missing.
Now make a guess: what happened?
I won’t keep you waiting: CPCs increased by 40%. ROAS tanked.
Why?
Well, “out of stock” items won’t show up in your Shopping ads. But we told Google they are allowed to spend the daily budget right? So, it will.
If you have a lot of products that are out of stock, Google will increase bids on the remaining items to spend the budget. In our case, ignoring the fact that the ROAS target had not been met.
Lesson learned: don’t trust the Google AI to be able to handle dramatic increases in the number of out-of-stock items in your Shopping campaigns.
And, you best believe this little script kiddie here is going to make sure the next time this happens, he will be alerted in time.
Expect a script soon for alerting you of dramatic increases in the number of out-of-stock items in your Shopping campaigns!
– Nils