What to check before you touch anything
- How is ROAS being calculated for each product? tROAS optimizes toward conversion value (by default, usually the sale price/revenue), not automatically toward margin. A high-margin product with a lower price and/or lower conversion potential can post a lower "raw" revenue-based ROAS than a cheap, low-margin, high-turnover product — and the system will end up underrating the very product that's more valuable to the business, unless it's told about margin separately.
- Is margin passed to Google Ads as part of conversion value at all, or does the system only work with sale price? If margin isn't reflected anywhere in the data, the strategy has no way of "knowing" that one product is more profitable to the business than another. By default (say, via a Merchant Center feed or a standard e-commerce tag), what typically gets passed is the sale price, not profit.
- How price-competitive are the high-margin products within their category? If they're genuinely priced above comparable competitor products, weak auction performance may reflect real demand, not an algorithm problem.
- Is there enough data on the high-margin products (click/conversion volume) for the strategy to have even had a chance to learn their potential? Lower-frequency products naturally get less signal to optimize on.
- Is the signal for high-margin products getting diluted inside a broader campaign/product group that includes a much higher-volume, low-margin line? The system optimizes, on average, toward whatever gives it more data.
Possible approaches
- If margin isn't reflected anywhere in the passed value, Google Ads has direct support for this scenario: when you set up conversion tracking, you define what value you want to maximize — revenue or calculated profit margin — and Maximize Conversion Value / tROAS strategies will optimize toward whatever figure you actually pass. This means the decision happens at the level of how the transaction's value itself is calculated (revenue minus the cost of the item), not through some separate add-on layered on top of revenue.
- Important clarification: Conversion Value Rules (adjustment rules) in Google Ads only support adjusting value based on three conditions — location, device, and audience. They don't let you adjust value by product category or by a specific SKU's margin — that's not the right tool for this particular job. If you need the system to see the margin difference between products, that difference has to be built into the transaction value itself (at the tag/feed level), not expressed through value rules.
- Google recommends passing whatever value most accurately reflects the business goal — revenue if sales volume is the priority, or profit if margin is the priority — and is explicit that this is a choice made once, at conversion tracking setup, not something you toggle on the fly without recalculating history.
- If high-margin products are getting little data because of low sales volume, it can sometimes help to spin them out into a separate campaign with their own (initially looser) tROAS, so the system can build up signal for them on their own, instead of getting lost in the aggregate stats alongside a high-turnover, low-margin line.
- If the high-margin products genuinely aren't price-competitive within their category (this isn't a Google Ads problem — it's an offer problem), then the fix isn't in campaign settings — it's in pricing or positioning those products, since the algorithm is reflecting real demand rather than artificially creating it.