Profit bidding uplift: find the profit averages hide
Most Google Shopping campaigns bid on revenue, with one average target for many products. That average quietly costs you profit — and reach.
This guide shows where the losses hide, where the uplift comes from, and what decides how big yours could be.
Hitting your ROAS target — so where's the profit?
Most accounts group products by brand or category, then give each group one target. It's tidy. It's also where the profit leaks.
- One target for products with very different margins
- Thin-margin products spending more than they make
- Best-margin products capped below what they can afford
- Losses found weeks later, when finance checks the numbers
It isn't your budget or your team. It's one average bid across products that each need their own.
Eight terms, in plain English
- ROAS
- Return on ad spend: sales ÷ ad cost. £400 of sales from £100 of ads = ROAS 4.
- Target ROAS
- The ROAS you ask Google to aim for. Entered as a %, so 4 = 400%.
- Grouped bidding
- Many products sharing one campaign or product group — and one target.
- Margin (before ads)
- What a sale leaves you after product, delivery, fees and returns — before advertising.
- Profit target
- The share of each sale (without VAT) you keep after every cost, ads included. GROW's default is 10%.
- Profit margin
- Profit after every cost, ads included, as a % of sales.
- Impression share
- Out of all the times your ads could have shown, the share of times they did.
- AI Overviews
- The AI summary at the top of some Google results. Shopping ads can show in and around it.
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