How to Spot Underperforming Products in Shopping Ads

By Corey Frankosky · Last Updated August 6, 2026

Underperforming products in Google Shopping quietly drain your budget while your winners fund them. If you want to spot underperforming products in Shopping Ads, you need to read the right metrics, pull the right reports, and apply filters that isolate the items costing you money. This guide walks through the exact metrics, reports, and review process I use to find those products, decide whether to fix them or exclude them, and move budget toward products that actually convert.

1The Metrics That Reveal Underperformers

Before you can act, you need to know which numbers point to a problem. Four metrics do most of the work when you are looking for underperforming products in Shopping Ads.

• Click-Through Rate (CTR): Measures how often shoppers click your ad after seeing it. The formula is (Clicks divided by Impressions) times 100. A low CTR usually means an unappealing title, a weak image, or uncompetitive pricing. Google also gives you Benchmark CTR data so you can compare your product to similar items in the same auctions.
• Conversion Rate: Tells you how many clicks turn into sales. A high CTR paired with a low conversion rate almost always points to a landing page issue.
• ROAS (Return on Ad Spend): Shows profitability per dollar spent. Products below your break-even ROAS are losing money, and products with an unusually high ROAS may signal that you are underspending.
• Search Lost IS (Rank): Measures visibility you are losing in the auction. When this hits 80 percent or higher, the cause is often poor feed quality or weak historical performance, not just low bids.

Question to Answer:

Which of your Shopping products fall below your account average CTR, and which sit below your break-even ROAS?

2How to Access Your Product Performance Data

You cannot fix what you cannot see, so start by pulling product-level data inside Google Ads.

1. Open the Products page: Click the Campaigns icon and select Products. Use the Workspace filter to switch between Shopping and Performance Max campaigns. This page shows the Item ID, product title, price, clicks, conversions, and product status for every item in your feed.
2. Use the Report editor for a wider view: Go to Insights and reports, then Report editor, then Predefined reports, then Shopping, and select Item ID. This lists every product with its performance metrics across campaigns.
3. Account for the sync delay: It can take 24 to 48 hours for updates from Merchant Center to appear in your Google Ads reporting, so do not panic over a product that just changed.

Google's own documentation describes the Products page as the place to understand how individual products perform in your campaign, and that is exactly how you should treat it. It is your first stop every time you audit performance.

Question to Answer:

Have you pulled an Item ID report for the last 30 days, or are you still guessing at product performance from the campaign level?

3Segmenting and Reading the Data

A flat list of products hides the patterns you need. Add columns and segments so the underperformers stand out.

Use the Columns icon to add ROAS, conversion value per cost, and absolute top impression share. Those three give you a fuller picture than clicks and cost alone. Then click the Segment icon to break the data down by time (day, week, or month), device, or network. Segmenting by device is one of the fastest ways to catch a problem. If a product converts on desktop but not on mobile, you are usually looking at a landing page or image issue on smaller screens.

If a product is missing from your reports entirely, check the Product diagnostics column for errors and confirm the item is not flagged as Excluded inside your product groups. A product that is not serving cannot generate data, and that silence is easy to mistake for underperformance.

Question to Answer:

When you segment by device, do any of your products show a strong desktop ROAS and a mobile ROAS that collapses?

4Using CTR and Conversion Rate Together

CTR and conversion rate tell you two different things, and reading them together tells you where the problem lives.

If your CTR falls below your account average or below the benchmark, the problem is on the ad side. Revisit your product titles, improve your images, and check whether your pricing is competitive against similar listings. Shoppers see your title, image, and price before they click, so those three elements decide your CTR.

If your CTR is healthy but your conversion rate is low, the problem is on the landing page side. Make sure the price in your ad matches the price on your site, confirm the product is in stock, and double-check that your Merchant Center feed is accurate. A price mismatch between your ad and your landing page is one of the most common reasons a well-clicked product fails to convert.

Products that burn through budget with plenty of clicks and almost no conversions over 30, 60, or 90 days are your prime candidates for exclusion or a serious rebuild.

Question to Answer:

For your highest-spend product with zero sales, is the failure happening before the click or after it?

5Analyzing ROAS and Profitability

ROAS is where you separate products that look busy from products that make money. To know whether a product is profitable, calculate its break-even ROAS by factoring in your Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) and shipping. Anything below that threshold is losing money on every sale.

Your target moves with your margins. High-margin items can succeed at a ROAS of 150 to 200 percent, while low-margin retail products may need 800 percent or more just to turn a profit. Shopping campaigns also tend to demand higher ROAS thresholds (400 to 500 percent) than Search campaigns (around 300 percent), because Shopping shoppers already see the price and image before they click, which signals stronger purchase intent.

Watch the top end too. An extremely high ROAS, something like 2000 percent, is not always a win. It often means you are underspending on a product with real demand and leaving growth on the table. If you want to set targets deliberately, my guide on Google Ads bidding strategies walks through how ROAS goals connect to your bidding.

Question to Answer:

Do you know your break-even ROAS for each product category, or are you applying one target across products with very different margins?

6Reviewing Performance Over 30, 60, and 90 Days

A single week can lie to you. A product might struggle for seven days because of a stockout or a pricing error, then perform well across a full quarter. Reviewing the same product over 30, 60, and 90 days separates a temporary dip from a persistent problem.

Google's ad auctions weigh historical performance alongside more than 200 other signals when they rank your products. That means a product with a weak history keeps carrying that weight, and it also means recent changes take time to show up. Use shorter windows to judge the impact of a promotion or a feed change, and use longer windows to catch products that are steadily losing ground.

Question to Answer:

When a product dips, do you check whether it also underperformed across 60 and 90 days before you exclude it?

7Filtering and Troubleshooting in Google Ads

Once you know what to look for, filters let you isolate the exact products draining your budget. Google Ads uses AND logic, so only products that meet every condition you set will appear in the results.

• Cost greater than 50 dollars and Conversions equal to 0: Surfaces products eating budget with nothing to show for it.
• CTR less than 1 percent: Highlights products that show up in searches but fail to earn clicks.
• Approval Status equals Disapproved: Reveals items blocked by feed errors or pricing mismatches.
• Status equals Not triggering ads, critical issues: Finds products that are not serving at all.

Merchant Center also has an AI-powered filtering feature that accepts natural language, so you can ask something like "Find visible products that have zero clicks" or "Which products cost me clicks but are out of stock?" and get a fast answer.

Checking external factors

Not every problem lives inside Google Ads. Confirm that the prices in your feed match the prices on your landing pages, because a mismatch can trigger disapprovals and hurt your competitiveness. Account for seasonality and weather too. Umbrellas, winter coats, and inflatable pools rise and fall with the calendar, so weak performance may just be the wrong time of year.

Check your Merchant Center Diagnostics for issues like Preemptive Item Disapproval, which flags inconsistencies between your feed and your website. Missing required attributes like GTIN, brand, color, or size can limit visibility or, in extreme cases, lead to account suspension. Keep in mind that after you fix product data, Google usually takes 3 to 5 business days to review and apply the changes.

Reading the Search Terms Report

Shopping ads do not use keywords. Google matches your product data (titles and descriptions) to shopper queries, so the Search Terms Report shows you the actual queries triggering your ads. If a product gets clicks but no conversions, irrelevant matches are often the reason, like a wine rack showing for "wine glasses." The Search Terms Insights tool groups queries into intent-based categories using data from the past 56 days, which helps you see whether a product is showing for the wrong intent without reading every query by hand. Once you spot the bad matches, add them as negative keywords. My guide to Google Ads negative keywords covers how to build that list without over-blocking.

Question to Answer:

Have you filtered for cost greater than 50 dollars and zero conversions this month, and checked those items for disapprovals before excluding them?

8Building a Regular Review Process

Spotting underperformers once is not enough. You need thresholds and a schedule so the work repeats without guesswork.

Set clear performance thresholds first. Flag products with meaningful spend and no conversions over 60 days, or a ROAS below 2.0 for high-margin products (50 percent or more). For lower-margin products (10 to 20 percent), target a ROAS between 5.0 and 10.0 to stay profitable. Use custom labels in your product feed, like "low_performer" or "pause_candidate," so you can manage weak items without pulling them out of your campaigns entirely. Keep records of every exclusion and bid change so you can refine your criteria over time.

Match the schedule to your campaign phase. During the initial optimization phase, run weekly reports so you catch sudden shifts, like a 50 percent sales drop on a top product or a technical feed error. Once the campaign stabilizes, move to monthly reviews for ongoing adjustments and quarterly reviews for strategic decisions. Pair your Google Ads reports with Google Analytics dashboards to track CTR, ROAS, conversion rate, and cart-to-detail rates automatically, and use the Auction Insights report to watch for competitor pricing changes that might explain a dip.

One more thing. When you change a bid strategy or reactivate a paused product, give Google Ads several days to finish its learning phase before you judge the result. Acting too early during learning leads to bad decisions. If you would rather hand this process off entirely, my Google Ads management services cover ongoing Shopping optimization.

Question to Answer:

Do you have a weekly, monthly, and quarterly review rhythm in place, or are you only checking product performance when something breaks?