Why are you paying Google to advertise a product that someone else is selling for less?

Google Shopping works brilliantly for plenty of brands. But there's an assumption that every ecommerce brand should be on it.

Here's how it goes wrong. A brand sells through stockists as well as its own website. Then it starts advertising on Shopping and finds itself bidding against the very retailers it supplies. It's the same product, often at a lower price and sometimes with free delivery too.

The brand pays for the click. The stockist wins the sale.

No amount of optimisation fixes that. A price gap is a commercial problem, not an advertising one.

Black Friday amplifies the issue. Retailers discount harder, shoppers compare more and bigger businesses have more room on margin. Smaller brands feel the pull to spend more and match every discount. More spend and a thinner margin on each sale is an expensive combination.

So, it's worth asking whether joining in makes sense at all. I explore this with clients and we often come down on the side of limiting Black Friday or side-stepping it altogether.

There's a bigger question underneath all this. Stockists are valuable and wholesale can be a big part of a business. But a customer who buys from your own website is one you can email, win back and keep. That relationship is worth something. Striking the right balance looks different for every brand.

It's also where my job changes shape. Sometimes my recommendation isn't to raise the budget or optimise further. It's to look at whether we're advertising the right products in the first place - and whether Google is the right platform for them.

The best advertising strategy isn't the one that gets the most clicks or even the most sales. It's the one that makes commercial sense.

Subscribe to my newsletter for a deeper look at when Google Shopping makes commercial sense, when it doesn't and how to approach your budget during Black Friday.