Why Bidding up on Underperforming Product Ads Is a Waste of Money

A product is underperforming, invisible to consumers or simply has a low click-through rate. You need to enhance visibility and clicks, fast.

What do you do?

A) You bid up on your Product Listing Ads (PLAs) in the hopes your product will be more visible to consumers.

B) You optimise and correct your product data including titles, descriptions, images and categories to increase relevancy.

If you chose A, we’re here to tell you why that’s a bad idea.

Google and Bing’s Shopping environments are fiercely competitive and it’s easy for your products to get lost in the crowd, especially in a busy category like Fashion or Electronics. Content optimisation, as a result, is a great way to enhance your products’ visibility by putting them directly in front of consumers, using terms that your customers are searching, making your products more likely to be seen and more importantly, more likely to convert.

When a product isn’t getting enough clicks, it might be tempting to up the bids on your ad to give them a boost. This, however, will typically only cost you more and do little for your product’s ROAS, ultimately exacerbating the issue.

Instead, consider that it is actually the product data that is crippling your ad, much in the same way as poor SEO does with organic visibility, making your products irrelevant to the terms your prospective customers are already searching. Quality score and relevance are as much as a consideration in a shopping search auction as they are in text ads, if not even more so.

Title, image, description or category (product type) are the crux of product ad relevancy and visibility. Ads will appear when a customer searches for something similar which means if your product content is poor or irrelevant, customers simply won’t see them. With 88% of consumers also saying detailed product content is a driving factor in their decision to buy (Forbes, 2016), this should be a priority.

Reviewing your customers on site search behaviour, your existing search query reports and researching high converting queries are your best options when assesing how to optimise your product data — if it is too vague, niche, or if you overcrowd with keywords, your ad will fall into the ‘low search volume’ category and will be inactive until its search traffic increases. Bidding higher on these would then be counter-intuitive, as no one is searching the keywords you have used.

You, the retailer, must now ensure your product content is accurate and optimised to suit buyer-behaviour, instead of simply relying on ads. By doing this, you will:

• Gain a competitive edge
• Drive ROI
• Increase your click-through rates
• Enhance visibility