Spend piled into a handful of products

A low price wins more auctions at the same bid, and nothing in the account knows what anything costs to make. So the spend drifts toward cheap products, whatever their margin.

The check does not say which products should carry the spend. That needs margin, which Google Ads only sees if you send cost of goods through Merchant Center or import profit as the conversion value. It says where the money went and what came back, the half of the question the data can answer.

The check runs on accounts with a product feed and reads spend, conversions and value by product.

Checks that weigh money or clicks judge what they find on your own account's numbers, not on one figure applied to every account, so what counts as a problem on a small account is not the same on a large one. Checks on settings read how the account is set up.

When there is too little to go on, the check says so instead of guessing. A finding always comes with the rows behind it, so you can read the evidence before you decide.

1. In Google Ads, open the Products report for the last 30 days.
2. Sort by Cost and count the products that spent.
3. Add up the cost of the top few and divide by the total.
4. If it is a large share, check each of those products' margin against its return.

Compare the top spenders with your margin list. Products that take a lot and return little at their margin can be moved to a separate campaign with a stricter target, or bid down.

Use custom labels for margin, so campaigns and targets can follow profit rather than price.

• Shopping campaign

The checks next to this one in Shopping and feeds, each with its own page.

• A whole catalogue bid at one price
• Where a Performance Max budget actually went
• The part of the catalogue that got no impression lately
• Asset groups Google rates below Good
• Products that cannot appear at all
• Asset groups holding less than Google can use