amaragomez
Every online retailer has products that seem to do most of the heavy lifting.
They generate the most sales, receive the strongest reviews and consistently appear near the top of ecommerce reports. When paid campaigns are launched, these products often become advertising stars as well. They accumulate clicks, conversions and revenue faster than the rest of the catalogue.
Naturally, more advertising budget begins flowing towards them.
It sounds like sensible optimisation. Put more money behind what already works.
But there is a less obvious question worth asking: did the advertising make these products successful, or did the products make the advertising look successful?
That distinction creates what we can call the bestseller trap. It occurs when advertising repeatedly captures demand for products that customers already know or want, while potentially overlooking products where advertising could create greater incremental growth.
For Australian ecommerce businesses managing large catalogues, understanding this difference can change how products, budgets and campaign performance are evaluated.
A Sale and an Advertising-Created Sale Are Not Always the Same Thing
Imagine an Australian retailer with a bestselling kitchen appliance.
The product already has strong brand recognition, hundreds of reviews and competitive pricing. Customers frequently search for the product by its exact name.
The retailer places it prominently in paid campaigns and sees an excellent return.
At first glance, the conclusion seems straightforward: advertising this product works extremely well.
But suppose a significant proportion of those customers were already planning to purchase it from the retailer. Perhaps they had previously visited the website, searched specifically for the brand or received an email promotion.
The advertisement may still have assisted the transaction, but its incremental contribution could be smaller than the platform-reported revenue suggests.
Now consider another product in the same catalogue that few customers know exists. Advertising introduces it to relevant shoppers and generates purchases that might never have happened otherwise.
The second product may show a lower headline return while creating more genuinely new demand.
That is why advertising effectiveness cannot always be understood from revenue alone.
Bestsellers Have an Unfair Head Start
Popular products arrive in advertising campaigns carrying advantages that other products don’t have.
They may already have strong customer recognition, better reviews, more competitive prices, established organic visibility and years of historical sales data. Their product pages may also have been refined over time because they receive more attention from the ecommerce team.
When advertising platforms observe that these products convert frequently, automated systems receive strong signals that encourage further exposure.
Success can therefore reinforce success.
A high-selling product generates more conversion data. That data encourages additional advertising exposure. More exposure produces more conversions, creating even stronger performance signals.
Meanwhile, a promising product with limited historical data may receive comparatively little opportunity to prove itself.
The result can become a feedback loop rather than a neutral competition between products.
Your Catalogue Has More Than Winners and Losers
Ecommerce reporting often encourages businesses to classify products into simple groups.
Some products perform well and deserve additional budget. Others perform poorly and should receive less.
Real catalogues are more complicated.
A product with low advertising revenue might be a genuinely weak offer. Alternatively, it could be a new product that hasn’t received enough exposure. It could have excellent margins but limited search volume, or it might appeal to a valuable customer segment that purchases additional products later.
Another item could generate enormous advertising revenue but have thin margins, high return rates or customers who would probably have purchased it without paid promotion.
Products therefore need to be understood according to their commercial role, not merely their advertising output.
Give Products Jobs
Instead of treating every item as though its only purpose is to maximise immediate return, retailers can assign different products different jobs.
Some products are demand harvesters. Customers already know what they want, and advertising helps the retailer capture that existing demand.
Others are discovery products. Their role is to introduce shoppers to something they might not have actively searched for by name.
Some are basket builders. They may not be particularly valuable when viewed individually, but customers who purchase them frequently add other items to the same transaction.
Others are customer acquisition products. Their first-order profitability may be modest, but they introduce customers who later return and make additional purchases.
There can also be margin products that deserve attention because each sale contributes substantially more profit than higher-revenue alternatives.
Once these roles are recognised, advertising decisions become more sophisticated than simply increasing budget for whatever currently has the highest return.
The Feed Is Becoming a Commercial Dataset
Shopping advertising is unusual because the advertisement is heavily influenced by structured product information rather than conventional ad copy alone. Google explains that Shopping ads use Merchant Center product data rather than traditional keywords to determine when products may appear. Product titles, images, prices and other attributes therefore play an important role in how products are matched and presented.
That means the product feed shouldn’t be treated merely as a technical connection between an ecommerce platform and an advertising account.
It can become a commercial management layer.
Products can be organised according to characteristics that matter to the business, such as margin, seasonality, stock position, product lifecycle or strategic importance. Google’s own product reporting guidance highlights the use of granular feed labels and product-level analysis to support budget and bidding decisions, including identifying high-margin items.
For retailers, this creates an opportunity to make campaign structure reflect business economics rather than relying entirely on historical advertising performance.
Revenue Can Hide Very Different Economics
Consider two products that each generate $20,000 in attributed advertising revenue.
From a revenue report, they appear equally valuable.
But suppose Product A has a healthy gross margin, rarely gets returned and frequently leads to repeat purchases.
Product B has a much thinner margin, expensive shipping and a significantly higher return rate.
The advertising platform may report similar revenue, but the financial value to the retailer is very different.
This is why google shopping management services should ideally be evaluated against more than clicks, conversions and headline return on ad spend. Product economics can materially change what apparently strong campaign performance means.
A retailer doesn’t ultimately bank ROAS.
It banks profit.
The Clearance Paradox
The bestseller trap becomes particularly interesting when inventory enters the equation.
Imagine a retailer has 500 units of a slow-moving product sitting in a warehouse. The product isn’t one of the strongest performers in advertising, so automated budget allocation naturally favours faster-selling items.
From a pure advertising perspective, that decision may appear logical.
From a business perspective, however, selling the slower-moving inventory could be more urgent. Warehousing costs money, products can become outdated and seasonal stock can rapidly lose value.
This creates a situation where the product an advertising system prefers and the product the business most needs to sell may be completely different.
Campaign strategy therefore benefits from understanding inventory pressure as well as conversion history.
Create a Product Opportunity Score
Retailers can take the idea further by developing an internal product opportunity score.
Rather than ranking products solely according to advertising return, consider several commercial characteristics together. A product’s margin, available stock, conversion rate, repeat-purchase potential, strategic importance and current advertising exposure can all contribute to the decision.
The purpose isn’t to create a mathematically perfect formula.
It is to force better questions.
A high-margin product receiving very little exposure may deserve investigation. A bestseller consuming a disproportionate share of budget might deserve an incrementality test. A product with strong click-through rates but weak conversions might have a pricing or product-page problem rather than an advertising problem.
The score becomes a way of finding products that conventional campaign reports might overlook.
Test What Happens When the Bestseller Steps Aside
One of the most interesting experiments an ecommerce business can run is temporarily changing how aggressively a dominant product is promoted.
The objective isn’t necessarily to stop advertising a profitable bestseller. Instead, the retailer can carefully test whether some demand continues through organic listings, direct visits, branded searches or other channels when paid exposure changes.
If overall sales remain relatively stable while advertising spend falls, paid campaigns may have been capturing demand that already existed.
If total sales decline sharply, advertising was likely playing a more significant role.
The exact interpretation depends on campaign structure, seasonality and other marketing activity, so these experiments need to be designed carefully. However, they can reveal information that ordinary attribution reports cannot.
Give New Products a Protected Learning Period
Another consequence of the bestseller trap is that new products may be judged too quickly.
Established products enter campaigns with historical conversion data. New products enter with almost none.
If both are forced to compete immediately for the same budget, the established product has an enormous informational advantage.
Retailers can address this by creating controlled learning periods for strategically important new products. This doesn’t mean spending indefinitely on products that fail to generate interest. It means allowing sufficient exposure to collect meaningful evidence before making a final decision.
The business can then examine search relevance, engagement, conversion behaviour and profitability rather than concluding that limited initial sales automatically mean limited potential.
Paid Media Should Answer a Bigger Question
The purpose of paid advertising management shouldn’t be reduced to finding the cheapest possible conversion.
The more commercially useful question is whether advertising is helping the business sell the right products to the right customers at an economically sustainable cost.
Sometimes that will mean putting more budget behind an established bestseller.
Sometimes it will mean supporting a high-margin product with lower sales volume.
At other times, the priority might be clearing seasonal inventory, introducing a new range or acquiring customers likely to purchase repeatedly.
Advertising performance should therefore reflect the objectives of the business rather than forcing every product to pursue the same metric.
Find the Products Your Dashboard Is Ignoring
The most interesting ecommerce opportunities may not always be sitting at the top of the advertising report.
They could be products with strong margins but limited exposure. They might be items frequently purchased alongside bestsellers, products attracting valuable first-time customers or new additions that haven’t yet accumulated enough data to compete with established inventory.
Finding them requires looking beneath account-level averages and headline revenue.
Google’s product reporting now provides retailers with more granular views across Merchant Center-connected campaign types, including product-level performance and eligibility information. That makes it increasingly practical to examine individual products and categories rather than judging an entire catalogue from blended results.
The goal isn’t to stop advertising bestsellers.
It is to understand why they are winning.
If they are generating genuinely incremental, profitable sales, their success deserves investment. If they are simply absorbing advertising budget because they already dominate customer demand, there may be unexplored opportunities elsewhere in the catalogue.
The next growth product might not be the one currently generating the most advertising revenue.
It might be the one that has never been given enough room to prove what it can do.