Boost Profits by Removing Low-Performing Products From Your Feeds

In the competitive landscape of e-commerce, every click and every dollar of ad spend counts. Marketers and business owners are in a constant race to optimize campaigns, improve Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), and maximize profitability. While much of this focus is placed on scaling winning products and refining ad creative, a significant and often overlooked optimization strategy lies in what you choose to remove from your advertising efforts. The silent profit killers hiding in plain sight are your low-performing products.

It’s a common misconception that a larger product feed automatically translates to more sales opportunities. In reality, a bloated feed cluttered with items that don’t convert can actively harm your bottom line. These products consume valuable ad budget, skew performance data, and dilute the impact of your star performers. By strategically identifying and removing these underachievers, you can reallocate resources where they matter most, leading to healthier campaigns and a direct boost in profits. This article will guide you through the why, what, and how of culling your product feed for greater efficiency and success.

The Hidden Costs of Keeping Low-Performing Products in Your Feed

Before diving into the methodology of removal, it's crucial to understand the tangible damage that low-performing products can inflict on your marketing ecosystem. The costs extend far beyond just a few wasted clicks.

Wasted Ad Spend and Depleted Budgets

This is the most direct and obvious cost. Every time a user clicks on an ad for a product that has historically low conversion rates, you are paying for traffic that is highly unlikely to generate revenue. In a Performance Max or Shopping campaign, the advertising platform’s algorithm may continue to serve impressions and solicit clicks for these items, effectively siphoning money away from products that have a much higher chance of converting. Over weeks and months, this steady drip of wasted spend can accumulate into a significant financial drain.

Skewed Performance Data and Misinformed Decisions

When dozens or hundreds of underperforming products are active in your campaigns, they drag down your account-level and campaign-level metrics. Your overall Conversion Rate may look disappointingly low, and your ROAS might seem stagnant. This can mask the true success of your top-selling items. It becomes difficult to accurately assess what's working when the data is muddied by the dead weight. This poor-quality data can lead to misguided strategic decisions, such as pulling back on a campaign that actually contains profitable gems hidden amongst the duds.

Negative Impact on Quality Score and Ad Rank

Advertising platforms like Google reward relevance and positive user engagement. Products that consistently receive impressions but have a very low Click-Through Rate (CTR) signal to the algorithm that they are not relevant to user searches. Similarly, products that get clicks but no conversions can indicate a poor landing page experience or a mismatch between the ad and the product page. These negative signals can lower the Quality Score associated with your products, which can lead to a lower Ad Rank and higher Cost-Per-Click (CPC) across the board, even for your better-performing items.

Budget Cannibalization

In some cases, a low-performing product might be a low-margin variant of a much more profitable item. For example, a cheap, basic version of a product might get clicks due to its low price point but rarely converts, while a premium, high-margin version is prevented from being shown because the budget is being spent on the less desirable option. These low-performing products can effectively cannibalize the visibility and budget of their more profitable counterparts.

Defining and Identifying Your Low-Performing Products

The term "low-performing" is subjective and can vary significantly from one business to another. The key is to establish clear, data-driven thresholds based on your specific goals, margins, and sales cycle. To begin, you need to analyze your product performance data from your advertising platform (e.g., Google Ads, Meta Ads) over a meaningful period, such as the last 30, 60, or 90 days.

Key Metrics to Analyze

Focus on a combination of metrics to get a holistic view. Relying on a single data point can be misleading. Here are the most critical metrics to consider:

• Clicks and Conversions: The most straightforward indicator. A product with a high number of clicks but zero or one conversion is a prime candidate. It’s attracting interest but failing at the final hurdle.
• Cost and Conversion Value (ROAS): Look at products that have spent a significant amount of money without generating a profitable return. Set a minimum ROAS threshold based on your product margins. Any product falling below this (e.g., a ROAS of less than 1.5) is costing you money.
• Impressions and Click-Through Rate (CTR): A product with very high impressions but an extremely low CTR is failing to capture user attention. Its title, image, or price may be unappealing, causing users to scroll right past it. While not a direct money-waster in terms of clicks, it clutters your feed and can harm your account's quality signals.

Setting Your Thresholds: A Practical Example

Let's create a hypothetical set of rules to identify underperformers. You could define a low-performing product as any item that meets one of the following criteria over the last 60 days:

• Rule 1 (The Money Pit): Products with more than 100 clicks AND 0 conversions.
• Rule 2 (The Unprofitable Seller): Products with a Cost greater than $50 AND a ROAS less than 2.0.
• Rule 3 (The Invisible Product): Products with more than 5,000 impressions AND a CTR below 0.5%.

By exporting your product performance report and filtering it based on these rules, you can quickly generate a concrete list of items that need attention.

The Strategic Approach to Managing Low-Performing Products

Once you have your list, simply deleting them isn't always the best or only option. A sophisticated feed management strategy involves a tiered approach, ranging from optimization and de-prioritization to outright removal.

Option 1: Optimization Before Removal

Before you exclude a product, ask if it can be fixed. The issue might not be the product itself, but how it's presented. Conduct a quick audit:

• Product Title: Is it descriptive and optimized with relevant keywords? Does it include the brand, color, size, or model number?
• Product Image: Is it a high-quality, professional image on a clean background? Are alternate images available?
• Price: Is your pricing competitive? A quick search can reveal if you're being significantly undercut.
• Landing Page: Does the product page load quickly, display correctly on mobile, and have clear calls-to-action? Is the product in stock?

Sometimes, a few simple tweaks to your feed data can turn a poor performer into a profitable seller. Give the optimized product a couple of weeks to see if performance improves before taking more drastic action.

Option 2: Segmentation and Bidding Adjustments

This is a powerful middle-ground strategy. You may have products that are not complete duds but are simply low-margin or slow-movers. You don't want to waste your primary budget on them, but you also don’t want to remove them entirely. The solution is segmentation.

Using a feed management tool like Feedance, you can create a rule that assigns a `custom_label` to these products. For instance, you can apply the rule: "If Clicks > 50 AND Conversions = 0, then set `custom_label_0` to 'low_performer'."

In your Google Ads campaign, you can then subdivide your product groups by this custom label. This creates a separate group specifically for your low-performing products. From there, you can set a significantly lower bid (or a lower Target ROAS) for this group. This ensures the products remain eligible to be shown but at a much lower cost, preventing them from consuming a significant portion of your daily budget.

Option 3: Complete Removal from the Feed

This is the final step for products that are beyond saving or are simply costing you too much money with no return. These are the items that failed the optimization test and continue to drain your budget even with lower bids. Using your feed management platform, you can create an exclusion rule to prevent these specific product IDs or SKUs from being included in the feed sent to your advertising channels. This is the most direct way to stop the financial bleeding and immediately reallocate that budget toward your winners.

Best Practices and Potential Pitfalls

As you implement this strategy, keep these important considerations in mind to avoid common mistakes.

• Consider Seasonality: Don't be too quick to remove a seasonal item during its off-season. A winter coat will naturally be a low-performing product in June. Ensure your analysis window accounts for seasonal demand.
• Give New Products a Grace Period: Newly added products need time to accumulate data. Don't label a product as an underperformer after just a few days. Give it a fair chance (e.g., a few hundred impressions or a couple of weeks) to prove its worth.
• Be Aware of the Buying Cycle: High-ticket items like furniture or expensive electronics often have a longer consideration phase. A user might click multiple times over several weeks before converting. Don't be too aggressive in culling these items based on short-term data.
• Automate with Care: Automation is key to managing this process at scale. Use rules in your feed platform to dynamically label or exclude products. However, regularly review these rules and their impact to ensure they are still aligned with your business goals. Don't just "set it and forget it."

Conclusion: Focus Your Firepower for Greater Profit

Trimming your product feed is not about limiting customer choice; it's about strategic resource allocation. By systematically identifying and managing the low-performing products in your campaigns, you transform your product feed from a cluttered catalog into a high-performance sales engine. You stop wasting money on dead ends, which frees up your budget to be spent on products that resonate with customers and drive real revenue.

The result is cleaner data for better decision-making, improved campaign metrics like ROAS and CTR, and ultimately, a more profitable and efficient marketing operation. Take the time to audit your product performance today. The profits you uncover may be hiding in the products you choose to leave behind.