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You open your ad account. Clicks are up, visits are up. Then you check your orders, and they haven't moved.

Take an online tea shop in Annecy. It's a made-up example, but a common case: it advertises on Google Shopping, visitors show up, and sales don't follow. You can run the check below on your own account.

A click is not a sale

On Google, you pay per click. Someone sees your ad, clicks and you get charged. If they leave without buying, you still owe for that click.

So a click is a visit you bought. Judging your ads by their clicks is like counting the people who walk through your door and never looking at the register.

The number that matters is simpler: what does one sale cost you? Divide your ad spend by the number of sales. Then compare that cost with your margin, the money you keep on a sale. That math tells you whether your ads pay off.

How Google Shopping picks your products

Google Shopping ads are the ones with a photo and a price that appear right in Google. They show up while people are comparing, which is why they matter so much to a store.

You don't choose keywords here. Google works from your product data: the title, the description, the photo, the price. Together they make up your product feed, the file that describes your catalog to Google.

That has two consequences. First, a vague title sends your product to the wrong searches, and you pay for clicks from people who wanted something else. Second, when your whole catalog shares one campaign, nothing guarantees the money goes to your best products.

Why the money goes to the wrong products

When your whole catalog shares one campaign, spend often follows the most clicked products. Those aren't always the ones that sell. The ones that really earn money can stay in the dark.

Picture a shop window full of things people like to look at, while the things they actually buy sit at the back of the store. People stop and stare, and the register stays quiet.

Why would a product attract people and not sell? It varies from store to store. The price looks great, then shipping scares people off at checkout. The photo is appealing, but the product page doesn't answer their questions. Or the title brings in people who were looking for something else. We start with the numbers, product by product, then we open the page.

Four moves, in order

Here's the order we follow when an account attracts clicks without selling.

How to run the check on your account

You can do this yourself. In Google Ads, open the Campaigns menu, then the Products page. Every product in your catalog shows its cost, clicks and conversions there.

One condition: your account has to count sales. That's what tracking is for. In Google Ads, a sale shows up as a conversion, an action you've chosen to count. If the Conversions column stays empty while you're selling, start there: without that number, nothing else means anything.

Then sort by cost, and put each product in one of these four boxes. The table talks about bids: a bid is the most you agree to pay for a click.

In a standard Shopping campaign, your products are sorted into groups, and each group has its own bid. You can isolate a product in its own group. If Google sets the bids for you, as in a Performance Max campaign, your only choice is to keep the product or remove it.

Give each product time to prove itself. A few clicks prove nothing. A simple rule of thumb: once a product has spent as much as your margin on one sale, without selling anything, it's time to decide.

If a product attracts without selling

Open its page the way a customer would. Is the price the same as in the ad? Do shipping costs show up before checkout? Does the page answer the questions people ask you all the time? If everything checks out, lower its bid or take it out of the campaign, and move on to the next one.

A worked example, to read a report

Back to our tea shop. The figures are made up for the example. The report compares two consecutive months, before and after the budget was moved to the products that sell.

Two lines look worrying. Each click costs 5 cents more. And the click-through rate, the share of people who click among those who see the ad, collapses.

Yet clicks didn't drop. Divide spend by cost per click: about 1,250 clicks the first month, about 1,780 the second. When the click-through rate falls while clicks rise, it means the ads are being shown far more often. Spend followed, and that's intended: once the money is on the right products, you can put more in.

The real change happens one step further: a much bigger share of clicks ends in a sale. Sales are multiplied by five, and each one costs three times less.

That leaves the test from the start: to know if it's profitable, you have to compare the cost of a sale with the shop's margin.

A click won't pay your bills,a sale will

Run this check every week

Your products, margins and competitors aren't the same as this shop's, but the check is the same.

Look at the cost of a sale, product by product. Put the budget where things sell. Take care of your titles. Then do it again every week, because your sales, your prices and your competitors keep moving.

If this check takes up too much of your time, someone on our team can handle it.