Shopping Ads: How many products is too many?

Summary

Table of Contents

Originally posted on reddit.

Question

I am an e-commerce store owner, with high ticket items, averaging about $2000-$3000 a product with over 200 SKUs.

In reality, I have over 3000 SKUs, but I am only advertising a certain product group, which consists of 200+.

My budget is already quite slim, $100/day for one standard shopping campaign operating on max clicks.

  • Do I have too many products in one campaign?
  • Should I take some out and only focus on 50? 10?
  • What is the ratio of products, to daily spend in a campaign you typically aim for?

Answer

It’s a business question. 

There’s no ideal amount of products, but with a lower budget you are bound to cut down on the number of products you want to advertise… and it wouldn’t make sense to optimise 3000 SKUs for $100/day. 

I usually advise my e-com clients with the following priorities when they have a low ad budget:

  1. Your most profitable product(s).
    • If they’re all equally profitable, then pick the ones you want to sell the most, or the ones you have the most stock for.
  2. The best selling product(s).
    • By bestselling, I mean in terms of volume. Of course you have to check the margin while doing so, but supposedly you should get decent returns. 
  3. The product you feel should be selling much better, but haven’t been able to fit lack of visibility.
  4. Trendy items.

The reasoning behind advertising high margin product is very simple: the more money you make out of advertising, the more value you see in it and the more likely you are to increase your budget to scale your operations further. 

Good luck and let us know how it goes!

It’s another one of these simple flowcharts that can help you decide how to invest your ad spend better!

Keep it simple: it’s all about making it profitable, because PPC is a money printing machine until it’s not.

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Célestin Hanatsuka

The Pig-in-Chief at PPC.ing (here). Also the head of L’atelier, which sounds like it’s a huge deal but considering his office is one meter away from his bed, he’s just being overly dramatic.

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