Why You Shouldn’t Always Listen to Google’s Suggestions...
Sometimes when the budget is limited, having too many products in the shopping ads means the algorithm has trouble gathering conversion patterns in order to optimize because each conversion on each shopping ad/product is too spread out across the weeks/months, so the answer is to temporarily exclude products until the algorithm can get the hang of things. Then, with scale later on, those products' shopping ads can be re-included. Just because we exclude a product, doesn't mean it won't be purchased. It just means it might not work well as a shopping ad & the money could be better spent on other shopping ads to bring people to the site...but those people still might buy these products.
“My website is slow. How important is it to have a fast website and does that affect ads?”
If you have a brick and mortar business and you’re running a special offer or a promotion, you can use Google Ads to drive traffic to your local store.
What can we do to reduce our CPC?
A smart approach would be to work your way to the top by generating affordable leads in a short amount of time with a small amount of budget by bidding on lower position, higher quality keywords. Then start to scale.
Start new campaigns with a manual bidding strategy until the algorithm has enough data to switch to automatic. Then, see how high you can push the algorithm to automatically raise its goal (i.e. target CPC of $X could be the goal). You must have conversion tracking set up correctly before running any campaigns or else you will be feeding the wrong data into the machine learning algorithms, which will obstruct its ability to get results. You can check this by going to the Conversions report and checking the “Include in Conversions?” column and making sure that only the appropriate conversion actions are included.
If you are launching a new product, there are a few ideas to get it out there.