How The “Mob Effect” May Hurt Your Google Shopping Campaigns

Written by Reese Garcia
Director of Data Operations

What’s The Mob Effect?

The Mob Effect happens when your Shopping campaigns aren’t structured around your most profitable products and search terms.

In other words, it’s what happens when products that sell well are hidden from the right audience, and poor-sellers with high search volume steal the budget.

The result? Profits are crowded out of the picture, spend is high, and sales are low. Let’s look at an example:

These products are responsible for more than half of Shopping spend and less than a tenth of revenue.

In this case, four of this campaign’s 100+ products are spending half of the budget over a 30-day span. And they’re only bringing in a tiny 8% of revenue.

But there’s good news: you can reverse The Mob Effect. And when you do, you’ll start to see revenue increase and CPAs decrease like this:

More revenue + lower costs = more profits.

The Problem with Shopping Campaigns

You can’t use keywords to control Shopping campaigns. Shopping campaigns won’t humor you and pretend like that’s a possibility either. So, left to their own devices, you can’t control the kinds of search terms your Shopping campaigns attract.

Some of your products will have more searchable titles than others. Because the product title is one of Google’s main signals for connecting searchers with products, this will be the main factor for which products you tend to show ads for.

And they may not even be your best sellers.

Searchability does not equal profitability.

How to Overcome The Mob Effect

The Mob relies on search terms and there are two main ways you can get around it.

1. Mob-Proof Your Product Feed
   To mob-proof your product feed, the first step is to weigh the search terms your Shopping campaigns are attracting versus the products you’re actually selling.

2. Mob-Proof Your Shopping Settings
   Use a combination of campaign priorities, shared negative keyword lists, and shared budgets. This helps to control the kinds of search terms your campaigns attract.

Recap: Say Goodbye to the Mob

Until now, The Mob Effect has stolen ROI from countless Shopping campaigns. But now you have the tools to take back control: product titles that are aligned with profitable search terms, and Shopping campaign structures that help you separate the gold from the dirt.