Should You Include High-Ticket Products in Your Shopping Ads? Not Always – Here’s Why

If you’ve ever asked yourself whether those premium, high-ticket items should sit front and centre in your Shopping campaigns, you’re not alone. It’s a common question we get from eCommerce clients, especially when they’re looking to scale quickly and hit ambitious ROAS targets.

On paper, it makes perfect sense. Bigger price tag, bigger return, right?

Well… not quite.

Sometimes those expensive products do help hit ROAS goals faster. But more often than not, they quietly drain your budget and skew performance in all the wrong ways. Here’s what we’ve learned after managing millions in ad spend across Google Shopping and Performance Max campaigns – and how you can use the same approach to make smarter decisions with your product feed.

The Dangerous Assumption Behind High-Ticket Products

Let’s say you’re selling a luxury item – maybe it’s a designer sofa, a piece of fitness equipment, or a professional-grade camera. The logic often goes:

“If I can get a single conversion, I’ll hit my return targets in one go.”

But in real-world campaigns, things rarely play out that neatly. These products often come with:

• Longer decision-making cycles
• Higher hesitation and drop-off rates
• Lower purchase intent from typical Shopping traffic

That mismatch means you could be spending significant budget pushing high-ticket products to an audience that’s just not ready to buy – or not the right buyer at all.

The Simple Audit You Should Run Today

Before excluding anything, run a basic performance check inside your Google Ads account. This is the same diagnostic we use at HOC-Digital to make quick decisions on what stays and what goes.

Go to the Products tab in your Shopping campaign and follow this step-by-step:

1. Filter a longer date range – At least 6 months for meaningful data.
2. Set a product price filter – Focus on products over £750.
3. Filter for conversions > 0.1 – We want products that have at least started to show some conversion activity.
4. Look at the product price column
5. Multiply product price × number of conversions
6. Compare that number to the actual conversion value Google reports

Here’s the critical bit: If that calculation is significantly higher than your reported conversion value, you’ve likely got a problem.

It means Google’s seeing conversions, but they’re not coming from the full-price purchase of that item. It might be attributed to an add-on, accessory, or someone bouncing to another product. Either way, the high-ticket item isn’t doing the heavy lifting – and it’s burning through your ad spend.

So What Should You Do With Those Products?

We don’t recommend removing them from your entire product strategy. That visibility still matters, especially for brand building and assisting later-stage purchases. But in most cases, here’s what we do:

• Keep them live in your organic Shopping feed – This maintains visibility for high-intent, lower-cost traffic (like free listings).
• Exclude them from paid Shopping and PMAX campaigns – This is where they do the most financial damage.
• Tag them using feed management tools – Tools like Channable let us assign the excluded_destination = Shopping_ads attribute. If you want to go a step further, add display_ads too.

This simple adjustment lets us stay visible without sinking budget into clicks that don’t convert.

High ROAS Isn’t About High Prices

Here’s the thing most advertisers miss: your best ROAS often comes from mid-range products with consistent demand, strong conversion rates, and straightforward purchase journeys.

We’ve run Shopping campaigns where £100 products outperformed £2,000 ones tenfold – not because of margins, but because they actually converted.

High-ticket products have their place, but they need to be treated with care. If they’re not proving profitable in paid campaigns, don’t let them sit there draining your budget while your best performers get buried.

Final Comments

Run the numbers. Exclude where needed. And always, always back your campaigns with insight, not just instinct.

Want help digging into your Shopping feed or setting up a smarter product structure? Get in touch – we’ll show you what’s working, what’s not, and how to squeeze more out of every click.

Let the numbers do the talking.