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Supply chain challenges continue to leave retailers with more out-of-stock items and no clear idea of when the items may become available again. When customers follow a Google Ad to a product page only to find that the item is unavailable, they go elsewhere and may never return.
To get out in front of this glaring symptom of supply chain woes, marketers can automatically pause Google Ads for out-of-stock items, reducing the friction and inconvenience for potential customers.
A relatively simple script for pausing Google Ads can yield major ROI in terms of greater sales, happier customers, and reduced labor to monitor and adjust ad campaigns.
The impact of out-of-stock items
Out-of-stock items can lead to disappointed, dissatisfied, and disappearing customers, especially if the item are often unavailable and for long periods of time. Of course, it takes mere moments for customers to look elsewhere for what they need.Not only does this drag on your bottom line when every conversion and every returning customer counts, but out-of-stock items can lead to wasted marketing spend when Google Ads continue to point prospective customers to items they can’t actually buy from you.
And while a direct-to-consumer brand with a handful of products can easily monitor and adjust Google Ads for out-of-stock items, brands with larger inventories and greater numbers of SKUs can find pausing Google Ads manually much more challenging, if not impossible. When you lose track of which Google Ads send users to out-of-stock dead ends, you’re likely to lose those sales and possibly those customers.
Fortunately, developers have created a script that runs hourly and automatically pauses Google Ads for out-of-stock items.
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How does the Google Ad script work?
Overall, the script works simply by automatically and hourly checking the URLs all active Google Ads point toward. The script then searches the product page for text such as “out of stock” and responds accordingly.
When a product is out of stock, the script pauses the ad and labels the ad as “Paused – Out of Stock,” saving your customers frustration and inconvenience, and potentially saving you from upsetting customers with ads for products you can’t deliver.
As important as pausing ads for out-of-stock items, the script also monitors for when items for paused ads are back in stock, another tough task to manage manually. If an item is available again, the script automatically re-enables the ad.
The Google Ad script is quite simple and quite effective at a time when supply chain issues put a premium on ad spend and sales conversions.
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How do you configure ad script to pause out-of-stock items?
The script provides the structure that you then adapt to your needs. You’ll need to configure the lines of code in the script to suit your purposes by including categories, strings, URLs, and other info unique to your website.
In everyday language, you configure the Google Ad script by telling the program what campaigns you want it to check periodically, about every hour. You’ll need to set it to check product URLs hourly to search for a string of text such as “out_of_stock” or “sold_out,” depending on the language you use on your website.
When using inventory-based ad management, be sure to include individual product page URLs rather than category pages. If a category page shows that any items are out of stock or sold out, it may pause ads for those categories.
Always test your script before setting it to work on your Google Ad campaigns. Your customers and your bottom line depend on it.
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Keep your product feed up to date
As you might imagine, keeping your product feed current is essential, because the script is only as accurate as the product availability data it reads on your product pages. In the light-speed world of e-commerce, this can be another major challenge to keep databases current and reflecting real-time inventory.
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How to determine when to pause your Google Ad
As with a lot of marketing, knowing when to pause your Google Ad is a balance of data science and intuition with a bit of contextual awareness. It’s an art and a science and a little bit of coding magic.
Know your goals, benchmarks, KPIs—where are you going? Where are you now? How do you know you’re getting there?
If your Google Ad isn’t helping you achieve your goals, it may be time to pause. When you can’t handle any more volume without sacrificing customer service and the customer experience, it’s time to pause.
And, of course, when supply chain problems leave you with out-of-stock items, it’s time to pause. Just be sure to communicate with your customers about why it’s out of stock, when it may realistically return, and do your best to make them happy in the meantime.
Using scripts to automate a Google Ad pause on out-of-stock items will go a long way toward avoiding annoyed and unhappy customers by pointing them only toward inventory you actually have.
