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Anyone else see ridiculous ROAS recommendations from Google (140%!!)?
Hi, We operate in the jewellery/jewelry space, which admittedly is a competitive market. We are a UK based business targeting both the UK and USA. When we initially started we saw fairly decent performance on standard google shopping. But then we moved across to performance max and we have slowly , overtime, seen the performance of our campaigns get worse and worse – to the point now we get recommendations from google to increase our budget and set 140% as our target ROAS! There is absolutely no point in being in business with a ROAS of 140%. We make a loss with anything below 200% and even a 200% ROAS makes it barely worth doing.
We have also seen the same gradual degradation on our UK campaigns – initially google recommended strong ROAS targets and overtime they have gradually lowered these.
Has anyone else noticed google gradually “recommending” lower and lower ROAS targets? We kind of knew this would be googles strategy and this would happen but i guess we didn’t want to believe it.
I’d be interested to hear how many out there have google recommending higher ROAS targets?! ?
thanks
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1 Reply
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Sounds like you might be better switching to a standard shopping campaign.
Were you running standard shopping campaigns previously or were they smart shopping campaigns that were “migrated” to Pmax?
I agree though, I don’t think the majority of ecommerce stores could run with a ROAS of 140%
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If standard shopping was doing decent, why did you move to PMax? Most brands are usually better off running a mix of PMax and standard shopping over running just PMax. It may even make sense to just run standard shopping if PMax is not working nor getting the ROAS you want.
What does your shopping feed look like? Has the business spent time building up the brand? Jewelry is very competitive and customers need to know what makes your brand different from all the other jewelry brands out there.
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>But then we moved across to performance max
There’s you’re problem right there.
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Yes the new “limited by target” notification is hilarious. You mean I could spend more if I accepted a lower return?? You don’t say…
It’s actually moderately useful for seeing when your campaigns with automated bidding stop spending their budgets, but the messaging is comical.
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The bid setting is never any guarantee of the actual result.
The higher the ROAS setting, the lower the actual bid.
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Yeah I’ve experienced the same thing on many different accounts, I also have one account in the same niche as you and in the UK. There’s a few strategies that I’ve been doing that have worked:
1) Use a tool like shoptimised and clone your products so the id will be xxxxxx_clone. So you’ll have in effect duplicated your products but in Google’s eyes they’re different as they have different ids. Add these clones as a custom label so you can separate them easily.
The normal products will continue to feed the pmax campaigns note you’ll need to change the setup to exclude the clones in pax, that’s where the custom label comes in.
Setup a standard shopping campaign(s) with the clones and exclude the none cloned products.
This allows you to be much more flexible and you don’t need to sacrifice certain products to test as standard shopping.
2) if you want more volume on pmax campaigns you need to lower you ROI targets otherwise it’ll gradually give you less and less traffic. Lower your targets on pmax and gradually start bringing them up. Make sure you add custom segments to your asset groups with top performing keywords from your old campaigns and as much other audience data that you can.
I’m still experimenting with pmax there’s lots of other tests I’m doing which I may share the results of at a later date.
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