Shopping campaign performance fluctuations: Targeting

Targeting settings (Products, Audiences, Keywords, location)

If your campaign is targeting a smaller group of users with very specific audiences, limited products, or location settings, it may also be more likely to have performance fluctuations. More granular targeting means there are fewer auctions that your campaign is eligible to enter at any given time. You may notice larger changes in spending or serving if the competition increases or decreases in this smaller set of eligible auctions, because there are fewer auctions the system can enter and win to improve performance.

What you can do

Consider expanding your campaign’s targeting to increase the number of eligible options and improve the potential reach of your ads.

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Targeting overlaps with other campaigns or ad groups

You may have multiple Shopping campaigns or ad groups in your account that are eligible to enter overlapping auctions due to similar targeting.

Example

If you have multiple ads from the same account that show the same product, only one will be entered into the auction.

What you can do

Checking product targeting overlaps between campaigns from the same Google Ads account:

1. In Google Ads navigate to the “Reports” tab, select Predefined reports (Dimensions)
2. Choose Shopping > Item ID report
3. Add the Campaign to the column
4. Change the order of the Item ID to A to Z to view the overlap of targeting for the same item from multiple campaigns

Your Google Ads account

 

Checking product targeting overlaps between campaigns from different Google Ads accounts:

1. In Merchant center navigate to "Settings", select Linked accounts
2. Review if there other Google Ads accounts linked to this Merchant Center account
3. If yes, check the Shopping campaigns set up in the other Google Ads accounts to see if the same product is being promoted

Your Merchant Center account

 

If you’d like to have multiple Shopping campaigns, you will need to ensure that the campaigns are running at different times using ad scheduling, targeting different products, targeting different locations, running on different campaign priorities, or linked to different Merchant Center accounts.

Note: To ensure optimal performance, it's recommended not to target a single product by more than a few dozen ad groups or campaigns.

 

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Need something else?

Check other common reasons why your campaign performance is fluctuating.