Can a 10 000% target ROAS have a bad impact on Google Shopping Ads performance?
Currently, I’m managing an account that sells high-ticket products.
Since these products are quite expensive there is an option on the website to request a quote or you can buy the product directly – which almost never happens.
Last month, for one of the products that cost 6000€ we got 5 quote requests at the price of 60€ per conversion – Making our ROAS 5*6000€/300€ = 10,000%.
I know that in an ideal world, we would have CRM connected to Google Ads and count only real sales. Unfortunately, in this case, that’s not possible.
My question would be, is it ok if I add 10,000% as a target ROAS? Will this hurt my campaign by squeezing it too much?
The short answer is:
Setting a 10,000% target ROAS will almost certainly harm your campaign by severely restricting its reach and performance.
Google’s bidding strategy, while aiming for your target, needs enough data and flexibility to find conversions.
A target that high tells the system to only bid on impressions it is almost certain will convert at a rate high enough to meet that extremely ambitious goal, which will likely result in very few or no clicks.
The solution to accurately value your conversions is to implement a server-side tracking solution like Google Tag Manager paired with Stape or Google Cloud Platform to feed real, post-CRM sales data back into Google Ads via the Google Ads API, allowing you to set a realistic target ROAS based on actual revenue.
The long answer is:
Yes, adding a 10,000% target ROAS will almost definitely hurt your campaign by squeezing it too much.
Smart Bidding strategies, like target ROAS, rely on a vast amount of data and predictive modeling to determine the optimal bid for each auction to meet your stated goal.
A target of 10,000% is so high that the system will interpret it as a requirement to find conversion opportunities that are astronomically profitable, leading it to drastically reduce its bidding and exploration.
It will only participate in the most restrictive set of auctions, believing few, if any, users will meet the criteria for such a high conversion value, which will cause your impressions, clicks, and conversion volume to plummet.
Even though your calculation shows a 10,000% ROAS based on quote requests, this is not a true reflection of sales revenue.
The current conversion value of 6000€ per quote request is grossly overinflated because the quote request is a micro-conversion, not the final sale.
If your true conversion rate from quote to sale is low (e.g., 5%), then your actual revenue per quote request is much lower (e.g., 5% of 6000€ = 300€).
Using the inflated 6000€ value confuses the algorithm, leading to the current high ROAS, but trying to enforce this unrealistically high target with target ROAS will choke the campaign.
The ideal long-term solution, given your high-ticket, quote-based sales process, is to implement server-side tracking to send accurate, post-CRM conversion data back to Google Ads.
You can use Google Tag Manager (GTM) for initial data capture and then send it to a server-side environment like Stape or Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
This environment processes the data and uses the Google Ads API to send back true conversion values after a sale is finalized in your CRM.
The process works like this: when a user requests a quote, you fire a lead Standard Event from your website with a temporary, low value (perhaps based on the average actual revenue of a quote).
You also capture a unique identifier, like a gclid (Google Click ID).
When a sale is made in your CRM, your server-side solution or middleware uses the Google Ads API to push a second conversion event – a purchase Standard Event – back to Google Ads, overwriting the original temporary value with the true revenue of the 6000€ sale.
This approach is excellent and cheap for several reasons: GTM and GCP have very generous free tiers, and Stape offers very low-cost hosting for smaller volumes.
The Google Ads API is the standard, free mechanism for advertisers to interact with their campaign data.
This setup ensures that your bidding strategy only optimizes for actual sales revenue, allowing you to set a realistic and effective target ROAS – likely one around 300% to 500% – that will drive performance without strangling your campaign.
You’ll move from optimizing for the “almost never happens” direct buy to optimizing for the “real sale” value from your quote requests.
About The Author
