What's the Problem?
When popular products have multiple variants (like size), they can appear as available to visitors, even if the variant the visitor wants is out of stock. The more popular the product is, the more exposure it will get when using automated dynamic ads, but Facebook and Google don't know the stock level of each individual product in your inventory.
This can lead to several customer experience problems:
- Visitors view the product, see their size is actually sold out, and leave frustrated. This increases your bounce rate, and makes it less likely the visitor will return.
- Now the same frustrated visitor starts getting bombarded with retargeting ads for a product that isn’t actually available, wasting budget and frustrating them further.
- Maybe the product was in stock when the visitor first clicked, but the stock level was so low that it sold in the time between the impression and the purchase. Again, this leads to a higher bounce rate, visitor frustration, and wasted budget that could have been used promoting a similar product with a healthy stock level.
Industry Best Practice
The standard for preventing the promotion of out-of-stock products is to make sure you don’t run out of stock! By finding your lead time delay (time between ordering and receiving new product) and the average daily usage of each SKU (how many are sold) you can calculate an ideal reorder point. Of course, you have to calculate it for every variation of every item (size and color), so it’s best to have inventory management software on hand to help out.
But what if you are nearly out of stock, and you don’t want to waste your budget promoting items that will sell out anyway? Or if you only have the extreme variants like XXL in stock, and not the popular sizes?
What's the Fix?
With ROI Hunter you can easily enrich your product catalog with product-level information (including stock level). You can set up your promotions to automatically exclude products whose variants are below a certain stock level from promotion. You can even automatically sort those products into a new, special campaign if you would prefer. You can also upload all this information to a simple CSV via secured connections or even to a simple Google Spreadsheet. Discuss this option with your feed provider, as they might already have this information in the master feed.
This solution can be used for both Facebook and Google Smart Shopping campaigns. Once the solution is in place, you can avoid wasting money on products too low in stock to promote, and reduce customer frustration. Instead, you can invest that budget into promoting other products in your inventory. Your bounce rate will drop, your new promotions will bring additional revenue, and visitors will discover more products from your inventory, leading to higher ROI and greater profit.
