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Google Smart Shopping – Sudden drop in impression and spend
I’ve been using smart shopping for three years now and it has always performed well until this year.
Back in May, my campaign decreased drastically in performance.
From 20k impressions a day to 100.
£30 a day to only £1-£2. (Budget always has been set at £30).
It ran poorly like this for almost the month before I made any changes.The campaign had been running with no TROAS, so I entered a low one (70%) to get it spending again.
This worked over July / August with impressions going back up, budget fully spent and I started receiving conversions again.
So I left the TROAS as is and didn’t touch the campaign again.This past week the impression and spend have dropped again to what it was in May.
What is going on to cause such a sudden drop in performance?
The product feed is largely the same.
I am hesitant to drop TROAS any lower.Edit: thanks for the replies. I see the other posts now. I am guessing what I experienced in May was a similar issue.
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12 Replies
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You need to make changes either to TROAS or bid strategy, I have noticed if you leave it untouched for many days it lowers down!
I hope you are adding negatives to it regularly
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I think there’s a bug man, there’s been a drop for most UK shopping accounts since last Friday.
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We have our ads run by an agency and they are saying there is a bug that has affected UK google shopping ads. Frustrating as our competitors seem to be showing up in google ads just fine with this same agency.
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Daily spend is usually £600+ however starting Friday the cost was down <£100 and impressions way down. Very worrying as we rely on shopping ads for revenue.
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Waiting for updates today. I expect may people are waking up to a terrible weekend performance on shopping ads and we will hear more.
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Same here. Lost 80% revenue/impressions since Friday. Extremely frustrating, hope it’s resolved very soon!
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I have had the very same issue. Not in UK but in Austria and it already occured in the end of July. My rep/support team is investigating.
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I’m very glad I came back to r/PPC today.
Since Friday our spend has dropped by 90%, and with that sales are similar.
Interestingly, for our key successful products Amazon has a complete sweep of the top 5 products in the Shopping Ad snippets.
The competitor metrics in Ads does not correspond with what’s happening at all – which makes me think they’re not at all based on real performance.
Edit: I’ve switched back to a manual CPC campaign (used prior to my Smart Shopping campaigns and lacking about 6 months worth of optimisations) and will chime back in if that’s working at least. It sounds like it’s limited to Smart Shopping but the only confirmation I have of that is other posters in this thread and a couple of posts on the Google Ads forum…
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Same here support ticket in with google since Saturday, initially tried to fob me off with generic answers.
wondering if its product category specific?
Our products are fires and fireplaces in the UK, whats everyone elses?
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Mine came back very briefly around 5pm but have gone again now, I hope this isn’t an actual change they’ve made, it was going so well before this
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Still no progress. Do you think anyone with any sway in Ads at Google even knows or recognises there’s an issue?
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Can confirm there is an issue here. Official communication: “thank you for bringing this to our attention. We have escalated this to our internal teams for dither insight. At this time we do not have additional details or a timeline to provide; but please note that further updates may take some time as our team prioritize issues according to impact.”
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While any other day the reason could’ve been a stagnant bid strategy or the TROAS, it seems that since the last Friday there is something wrong with Google UK’s algorithm since a lot of ad campaigns for UK-based online enterprises are down. This bug has affected the daily ad spend, impressions, and ad revenue for some time now. We need to wait for an update by Google since there’s almost zero probability for this to be a technical fault from the businesses’ side of things.
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Confirming now that the technical issue is now resolved
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