We frequently get the question “Why aren’t my product ads showing on Google when I search for them?” Advertisers often assume there’s some problem with the product feeds or the campaign setup, and that could be. But if you have set up everything correctly and enabled the products in Google Merchant Center (GMC), the reason your products aren’t showing isn’t a technical issue. So what is it? Let’s dig in!
What Makes Products Show Up?
The obvious first step is to double check that the product is in your shopping feed and not disapproved. Is it actually enabled for advertising? If there’s some technical issue, then obviously you need to figure out what it is and fix that. But usually this is not the case – at least with our clients.
If the product is in GMC and not disapproved, then what is the problem? Let’s take this moment to remind ourselves what it takes to get a product ad to show up in search results. It’s really simple. You have to outbid your competitors.
As a general rule, if they are willing to spend more to buy the ad placement than you are, their ads will show and yours will not. This is the most common reason why ads aren’t showing. Your competitors are simply outbidding you and buying those ad slots. In other words, your bids are set too low to win the ad auctions.
How Quality Score Impacts Ad Auctions
But there’s another level here. The highest bid doesn’t always win in an ad auction. The product with the highest Ad Rank wins the auction. Your Ad Rank is basically your bid multiplied by your Quality Score. Google, like all other ad platforms, factors in the quality of your ad so high bidding spammers don’t just win all the ad auctions and dilute search results with poor content. Google wants to make sure that your ad is actually relevant to the searcher’s intent.
So if your product isn’t a great fit for the user’s search, Google may assign it a low quality score, which means you have to bid much higher in order to win the auction. If your quality score is a 3 and your competitor’s is a 6 and you both bid 50 cents, your competitor will win the auction. In fact, to be a contender, you would have to bid twice as much (since your quality score is half as much).
The Quality of Your Product Data Feed Drives Ad Results
This is where data quality comes in. Shopping ads are targeted to users based on the data that you pass to Google Merchant Center in your product feed. If you have a poor quality feed with very few attributes filled in and a lot of errors, but your competitors have much higher quality data, Google is going to be able to better match searcher intent to products in the feeds of your competitors. That will manifest as your competitors having higher quality scores, and winning ad auctions with lower bids.
But the same is true in reverse. If you really focus on the quality of your data and fill in every possible attribute with rich information so Google can precisely match your products to what people are looking for, your Quality Scores will be high and you can win more auctions at lower bids, even when you underbid your competitors. Fix your data!
CTR Is the Biggest Component of Quality Scores
The biggest factor in how Google calculates quality scores is the click-through rate (CTR) on your ads when they show. It’s worth taking time to consider what would make someone click your product ad versus a competitor’s.
Shopping ads show very little information in the actual ad. The main three components are the first 2-5 words of the product title, the image, and the price. A searcher has to know that your product is what they are searching for in the first 2-5 words of your product title. Your image has to clearly be what they are looking for.
And when several sellers all have the same product shown alongside each other, searchers will tend to click on the lower price options first. Price matters a lot. Even if you are only a few cents below a competitor, you will receive a lot more clicks.
So in order for people to click on your ad, you need a good image, a good title, and a good price. If you’re not seeing your products, look at these three elements in the ads of your competitors and consider what improvements you can make in your own product data feed.
Think about it from Google’s perspective. Google doesn’t get paid unless someone clicks on an ad. So they reward ads that get clicked on more with what amounts to a discount. Ads that don’t get clicked on as much don’t get shown as much because they are penalized with a low Quality Score.
Your ROAS Targets Are Too Low
If you have no technical problems and great product data, then let’s dig a bit deeper into what you’re bidding. A lot of advertisers are too conservative on their ROAS targets. This represents a desire to maintain high margins. But you may have hungry competitors out there who are much more aggressive in order to gain market share. Some may be willing to sacrifice all of their profit in order to take some of your business away from you in the hopes they can find profitability down the road.
In general, there are optimal levels for setting ROAS targets in order to maximize long-run profitabilty that we’ve written about in other blog posts:
What matters here is that if you are habitually underbidding, your competitors are going to be winning the auctions, making the sales, and gradually taking away your market share. If you’re overbidding, then not only are you losing money on every sale, but there’s also a risk that you have some competitors with a cost advantage who can afford to outbid you.
If you have competitors who are overbidding and losing money on every sale, and you may just need to wait them out until they are forced to cut their bids because they have wasted too much of their savings. In this case, it is probably best to stay the course, keep your bids at profitable levels – and if you have competitors outbidding you at unprofitable levels, just let them lose money until they back down.
If you are in a situation where you have poorer margins because your costs are higher, then competitors will always be able to spend more on ads than you can and still be profitable. Their ads will show more than yours. You can’t fix this situation through your product data or ad account setup. You need to find ways to streamline your business, negotiate better prices from suppliers, or find another competitive advantage.
Remember that if you set a Target CPA or Target ROAS goal for your products, what you are really saying is, “If the ultimate financial result from displaying this ad doesn’t meet my target, don’t display the ad.” If a given set of products have poorer results than other products for any number of reasons, Google will throttle showing those ads unless performance picks back up in the future.
Maybe Nobody Searches for That Product?
It feels like stating the obvious, but there’s an 80/20 rule about nearly everything in life, and some products simply aren’t very popular. In the case of really fringe products, they may not get enough searches on Google for the platform to gather enough data to figure out what products match which searches. Or there may be hundreds of different products that all match the same keywords, and in this case Google learns which ones sell best and favors those items.
When there is very low search volume for long-tail keywords, Google may not show the best results, even if you do everything right. This is common with many product in large catalogs. That’s just life. Some products are just more popular than others.
Google Shows Everyone Different Search Results
Now let’s think about this from another angle. Google’s search results are customized differently for each person. Google knows a lot about you. If you regularly search for your products and never buy them, Google might vary your search results a bit to show other products to see if you might buy them instead. What you see as search results is not the same as what your customers see.
This means that if you want to know what product ads are showing on Google, you can’t just do your own search and trust what you see. Those results are just for you. In order to get a complete picture of what ads are showing, you have to actually pull reports from other sources, like the Google Ads Reports Editor or Google Search Console. Don’t trust what you see in front of you. Trust the reports that tell you what everyone else is seeing.
If you can’t find a product when you search for it, check that item in the Google Ads Report Editors and see if it is getting Impressions. If it is getting Impressions, then it is winning ad auctions and being displayed to other searchers.
The Bottom Line
If your products are enabled in GMC, then it’s probably not a technical problem. Your ads aren’t showing because you’re not winning ad auctions. To win, you have to have higher Ad Rank than your competitors.
You can’t control what your competitors do. But you can make sure your own product data is exemplary. You want to make sure your Quality Scores are the best they can possibly be. A key component of that is click-through rate. And a key component of that is your prices. If you’ve got great data and competitive prices, you should really look into whether your bidding and budgeting are set too conservatively. Do your competitors have more aggressive ROAS targets than you?
And remember, the search results that you see are not indicative of what others see. As you navigate all of this, don’t trust your own search results. Use real data from the reports available to you. It’s very likely that the product you are searching for really is showing up in search results for other people, just not for you because you’ve set all your ad campaigns to optimize towards conversion value and you never actually buy anything. And really, if you think about it, you don’t want your ads to show up for people who aren’t ever going to buy.
After reviewing the possibilities above and fixing any issues you find, you should have confidence that your products are showing when they can to the consumers.
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