Ecommerce PPC is not general PPC. The challenges are different. The solutions are different. Approaches that work for lead generation or brand awareness often fail for product sales.
Here are the specific challenges and what actually works.
Challenge 1: Catalogue Complexity
The problem: Hundreds or thousands of SKUs, each needing attention. You cannot manually optimise every product.
What does not work: Treating all products equally. Generic campaigns that bid the same for everything.
What works: Product tiering based on commercial value. Your top 20% of products (by margin contribution, not just revenue) receive strategic focus. The rest receive systematic management with clear rules.
This means accepting that not every product gets the same attention. The alternative is giving everything mediocre attention, which is worse.
Challenge 2: Margin Invisibility
The problem: Standard platform reporting shows revenue and ROAS. It does not show profit. You can hit excellent ROAS while losing money.
What does not work: Optimising for ROAS and assuming profit follows. ROAS treats all products as equal. Your business does not.
What works: Margin-integrated measurement. Every product, every campaign connected to actual profit contribution. Decisions based on what generates margin, not what generates impressive metrics.
This requires data infrastructure most brands have not built. It is worth building.
Challenge 3: Competitive Dynamics
The problem: You are bidding against competitors in real-time auctions. Their actions directly affect your costs and visibility.
What does not work: Ignoring competition. Optimising your account as if it exists in isolation.
What works: Competitive awareness without competitive obsession. Understanding your position in key auctions. Knowing where you win, where you lose, and why.
But not reacting to every competitive move. You cannot out-bid everyone. You can out-think everyone.
Challenge 4: Seasonality
The problem: Ecommerce demand fluctuates dramatically. What works in October will not work in January.
What does not work: Static strategies. Set-and-forget approaches that ignore temporal patterns.
What works: Seasonal planning with tactical flexibility. Understanding your specific demand patterns (not generic retail seasonality). Building strategies that adapt to predictable variation while maintaining core principles.
Challenge 5: Channel Interaction
The problem: Customers discover products through multiple channels before purchasing. Optimising any single channel in isolation distorts the picture.
What does not work: Channel isolation. Treating Google Ads as if it exists independently of everything else.
What works: Cross-channel awareness. Understanding how your Google investment affects organic search, how Shopping and Search interact, how social discovery drives branded search.
Not perfect attribution (that does not exist). But awareness of the relationships.
Challenge 6: Feed Quality
The problem: Your product data determines where your products appear and how they perform. Bad feeds mean bad results, regardless of bidding excellence.
What does not work: Treating feed management as a technical checkbox. "We have a feed tool" is not a strategy.
What works: Strategic feed management. Titles optimised for search, not just accuracy. Descriptions that convert. Product data that enables the campaign structures you need.
Your feed is a strategic asset. Treat it like one.
Challenge 7: Scaling Limits
The problem: Every account has efficiency limits. Push past them, and marginal returns collapse. Most brands do not know where their limits are.
What does not work: Assuming linear scaling. "If £50k generates X, £100k will generate 2X."
What works: Understanding your marginal efficiency curve. Knowing where the diminishing returns begin. Scaling to optimal efficiency, not maximum spend.
Sometimes the right answer is spending less, not more.
The Common Thread
Every challenge above has the same underlying issue: generic approaches applied to specific situations.
Ecommerce PPC requires ecommerce-specific thinking. That means:
- Margin-aware optimisation
- Product-level strategy
- Competitive context
- Temporal adaptation
- Cross-channel awareness
Brands that apply generic PPC playbooks to ecommerce problems will generate generic ecommerce results. Which is to say, mediocre ones.
Struggling with any of these challenges? Our Google Ads Audit for Ecommerce identifies exactly where your account diverges from ecommerce best practices.