My ROAS Is Too Low
What to do:
Adjust bids at product level, not line item level. Filter your top products by spend, then reduce bids slightly on any product whose ROAS is below your threshold. This is more precise than lowering the line item bid, which pulls everything down together.
Keep a margin above the minimum bid, roughly 20%, and the cap at least 30% above your bid.
Switch to the Revenue Optimizer, which optimizes directly towards ROAS.
Turn off persistent low performers. If ten days of adjustment has not moved a product, switch it off rather than keep bidding on it.
What will happen:
ROAS will increase.
Scale will decrease: impressions, clicks, spend, units sold, and total sales will fall over time.
My Average CPC Is Too High
What to do:
If you want to hold it below a specific amount:
Set a CPC cap on the line items where your average CPC is too high. This applies to Revenue and Conversions Optimizer line items.
Lower bids progressively at line item or product level, keeping a margin of roughly 20% above the minimum bid and the cap at least 30% above the bid.
Switch to the Clicks Optimizer if you want a fixed CPC. It does not adjust your bid.
What will happen:
Your average CPC should decrease.
Eligibility and scale may decrease, and competitor ads may appear more often, or higher up the page, than yours.
I Want to Appear More Often in Top Placements
What to do:
Increase your bids progressively and monitor the results.
Raise the CPC cap if you are on the Revenue or Conversions Optimizer. These models adjust your CPC to maximise performance, and a cap set too close to your bid prevents them from bidding into the auctions you want to win. Keep the cap at least 30% above your entered bid.
Switch to the Clicks Optimizer. It is the strongest model for highly competitive categories, because it optimizes for competitiveness and click-through rate rather than ROAS or cost per order.
Use page type bid multipliers to bid up on the page types where those slots sit, rather than raising your bid everywhere. You cannot bid on one placement alone, but bidding up its page type competes harder for every slot on pages of that kind.
What will happen:
Impressions, clicks, spend, units sold, and total sales should increase.
Your average CPC will increase.
Click-through rate and ROAS may fall.
Your budget may deplete faster than you planned. To learn more, please see I Want to Stay Live Later in the Day.
To learn more, please see Adjust Your Sponsored Products Bids for page type multipliers.
I Want Specific Products to Scale
What to do:
If all your products are in one line item:
Increase product-level bids on the priority products relative to the others, using product bid overrides.
If your products are in separate line items:
Group your priority products into one line item and give it its own budget.
Set that line item's bid higher than your non-priority line items, and raise it progressively until you reach the scale you want.
Adjust at product level within it if priorities vary inside the group.
Raise the CPC cap on that line item, keeping it at least 30% above your bid.
Consider the Clicks Optimizer for that line item, for greater scale and competitiveness.
What will happen:
Impressions, clicks, spend, units sold, and total sales should increase for the prioritized products.
Your average line item CPC will increase.
Click-through rate and ROAS may fall at line item and campaign level.
Their budget may deplete faster than you planned.
I Want to Stay Live Later in the Day
What to do:
Increase the budget so it can serve across the full day.
Set a daily or automated pace. With no pacing, a line item spends as fast as it can win auctions, which is the most common cause of capping out. Automated pacing spreads the remaining budget across the remaining days.
Lower your CPC bids, so your budget covers more clicks.
Use product bid overrides and page type multipliers on your weaker performers, including negative multipliers on low-performing page types, to stop them consuming budget early.
Use ad scheduling. If you know which hours matter, run your ads only in those hours rather than letting the budget go in the morning. Ad scheduling is also known as dayparting.
Consider Adaptive CPC. It is pacing-aware, adjusts bids when a line item is spending too fast, and aims to keep a line item live for at least 16 hours a day.
What will happen:
Line items will serve for longer in the day.
To learn more, please see Understand Budget, Caps, and Pacing, Schedule When Your Ads Run, and Choose an Optimization Model for Sponsored Products.
Understand Your Win Rate
Win Rate tells you how competitive your bids are. It is the most useful single metric for deciding whether to bid up.
What It Is
Win rate is the number of product slots you won at auction, divided by the number of your products that participated in the auction.
Why It Matters
A low Win Rate means your bids are not competitive enough to win the slots you are entering. A high Win Rate with low scale means the opposite: you are winning what you enter, so the constraint is elsewhere.
Use 90% as your dividing line. Below 90%, your bid is usually the problem. At 90% or above with your budget still unspent, the problem is usually available inventory rather than your bid. See My Campaign Is Not Spending Its Budget for what to do in each case.
Where To Find Win Rate Insights
On the Line Items dashboard, add it as a column. It sits under Performance in Modify Columns, alongside Impressions, Clicks, CTR, Spend and Avg. CPC. This is the quickest route if you want to see how competitive your live line items are.
In Analytics, for reporting and export:
Go to the Analytics tab.
Under Account Activity in the left panel, choose Onsite Sponsored Products Activity.
Select Win Rate from the metrics dropdown above any chart or Edit the metrics in the table.
Click Apply. Your selection is saved as the default view until you change it.
To export, click Export at the top right.
How To Act On It
Raise CPC bids to grow Win Rate, and raise budgets to support them.
Set CPC overrides on low-performing keywords and products rather than raising everything.
Use page type bid multipliers on the page types where your Win Rate is weakest.
When to Change Your Optimization Model
Bidding is not always what limits performance.
If a campaign or some of its line items are neither scaling nor performing, it may mean that with your current products, targeting, and timing, both ROAS and scale are not achievable through bidding alone.
At that point:
Reassess your ROAS target. It may be unrealistic for this category and this competition.
Decide which you want. Performance or scale. Pushing both produces neither.
Focus on a secondary goal if the primary one is out of reach for now.
Change something other than the bid. A different optimizer, or a different group of products in the line item.
Which model to move to:
If you want | Use |
|---|---|
Maximum scale and competitiveness | Clicks Optimizer |
Lower cost per order | Conversions Optimizer |
Higher return on ad spend | Revenue Optimizer |
Pacing managed for you | Adaptive CPC |
To learn more, please see Choose an Optimization Model for Sponsored Products.