Google Shopping Ad performance all of a sudden dropped off a cliff
Hey guys
I’m running a Google Shopping Ad and the performance up until now had been steadily climbing week on week, but this week has dropped by almost 85% compared to last weeks conversions. Still getting impressions and clicks (though not as many) but conversions have completely dropped off a cliff. Seemed to just happen all of a sudden. I haven’t changed any campaign settings.
I’m fairly new to the world of E-commerce. Is it normal to see this drastic of a swing? Could something else be causing this issue?
The short answer is:
No, an 85% drop in conversions is not a normal swing, and this severe decline, especially if clicks and impressions are relatively stable, often points to a break in your conversion tracking or product feed health, not market volatility alone.
The most likely culprit is a sudden disconnect between your eCommerce platform, your product data or your conversion data flowing into Google Ads.
You need to use the Google Ads API to audit your conversion actions and bid strategy data, and the Google Merchant API to check the status and health of your product feed.
You should also check for any recent server-side tracking changes using Google Tag Manager (GTM) and Stape which could have broken the Google Analytics Measurement Protocol integration for server-side conversion reporting.
A server-side fix using these APIs is a highly cost-effective and robust solution compared to relying solely on fragile client-side tracking.
The long answer is:
The sudden, drastic drop in conversions while maintaining some traffic suggests that either your product eligibility has been compromised or your conversion reporting has failed.
The first step is to immediately use the Google Merchant API to programmatically check the status of your entire product feed and individual items.
You are looking for new disapprovals, warnings, or errors that might have been automatically applied by Google’s systems for issues like incorrect pricing, missing required attributes, or policy violations.
Even one disapproved critical product can severely impact performance.
If the feed is clean, the problem shifts to tracking.
Your conversions are likely being sent to Google Ads either directly from the client-side, or more robustly, through server-side tracking.
If you are using server-side tracking, a recent change in your GTM server container deployed via a service like Stape, or an update on your eCommerce platform, may have inadvertently broken the data layer or the firing of the server-side tag that uses the Google Analytics Measurement Protocol to report conversions.
This API is critical for sending robust, reliable purchase data directly from your server to Google Analytics (which is then imported into Google Ads).
To address this, use the Google Ads API to pull detailed performance reports, specifically focusing on the “Conversion Action” and “Conversion Source” to pinpoint exactly which conversion point has stopped firing.
Once the root cause (feed issue or tracking break) is identified, fixing the API connection or the GTM/Stape setup is fast and keeps your data flowing reliably, which is much more cost-effective than wasting ad spend on campaigns with broken reporting.
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