Your Short Overview: don’t exclude your non-converting products — separate them. Pull your zombies and low-traffic products out of your main campaigns, where they compete against your proven performers and get starved of budget, and give them their own dedicated discovery campaign with isolated budget and room to breathe. Some will gather data and start converting; the genuinely dead ones reveal themselves clearly, and only then do you cut them.
This is the corrected core of a proper Shopping strategy, and it’s the step most people get wrong. It’s covered at a high level in our complete Google Shopping guide for South Africa — this piece is the full how-to.
Why excluding zombies is the wrong move
When advertisers discover they have a big pile of non-converting products, the instinct is to exclude them all. It feels decisive, and it does bump your reported ROAS. But it’s a blunt instrument that causes two problems.
You throw away rescuable products. Many “zombies” aren’t genuinely dead — they’ve simply never had a fair chance to prove themselves, because they were drowned out in a campaign full of heroes. Exclude them and you’ll never know which ones could have worked.
You leave the structure unchanged. Exclusion treats a demand problem like a hygiene problem. You’ve removed the symptom, but the underlying setup — everything crammed into campaigns with no room for discovery — is untouched, so the problem quietly rebuilds as new products arrive.
Excluding a product should be the end of a process, made on evidence — not a guess you make at the start.
Why low-traffic products starve in your main campaigns
To understand the fix, you have to understand why these products underperform in the first place. It’s usually not the product — it’s the company it’s keeping.
Smart Bidding allocates budget toward signal. In a campaign that contains both proven heroes and untested newcomers, the algorithm does exactly what it’s designed to do: it sends the budget to the products with conversion history and starves the ones without. The newcomer never accumulates enough data to prove itself either way. It sits there getting a trickle of impressions, never enough to convert, looking like a zombie — when really it’s just been outcompeted for attention by its own campaign-mates.
Put that same product in a campaign where it isn’t competing against established winners, give it a controlled budget and a clean window, and you finally find out whether real demand exists. That’s the entire logic of a discovery campaign.
How to build the discovery campaign
Step 1: Identify what goes in it
Your discovery campaign holds two kinds of products:
- Low-traffic and non-converting products pulled out of your main campaigns — the zombies that need a fair chance to prove demand.
- New products entering your catalogue with no history yet (more on this below).
Before you move anything, roll variants up to the parent product so you don’t misjudge a winner that only looks dead because its clicks are split across a dozen size/colour variants. And apply a price-band check — high-ticket, long-consideration products belong in a separate treatment, since they can show zero conversions in a short window without being dead.Â
Step 2: Give it isolated budget
The whole point is that discovery products don’t compete with your heroes for budget. Set a dedicated daily budget for the discovery campaign — enough that each product can accumulate meaningful data over the window, but capped so you’re controlling your exposure to unproven products. Think of it as a deliberate, budgeted experiment, not open-ended spend.
In ZAR terms, size the budget against how many products you’re testing and how many clicks each needs to prove itself — a campaign testing 500 products needs more room than one testing 50, but neither should be allowed to run away.
Step 3: Choose a bid strategy that allows exploration
Your main campaigns might run an aggressive target ROAS. Your discovery campaign should not — a tight tROAS tells the algorithm to avoid anything unproven, which defeats the purpose. Use a strategy that permits exploration: Maximise Clicks to force traffic to the products, or a deliberately loose tROAS that lets the algorithm test the waters. You’re buying data here, not chasing efficiency.
Step 4: Set a clear evaluation window
Decide up front how long, or how many clicks, each product gets to prove itself — for example 30 days, or 50 clicks, whichever comes first. This is the “discovery clock.” Without a defined window, discovery products drift indefinitely, which is just a slower version of the original problem. With one, every product reaches a clear decision point. This principle is worth applying to every new product you add.
Step 5: Read the results and decide
When a product hits its window, one of three things is true:
- It converted. It’s earned its place — graduate it into your main campaigns and your performance tiers.
- It got a fair shot and didn’t convert. Now you can exclude it with confidence, as a data-driven decision rather than a guess.
- It’s a genuine long-consideration or seasonal case. Give it a longer runway or measure it through a different attribution model before deciding.
The two campaigns you end up with
Done properly, this split produces a clean structure:
- Your core campaigns carry only proven converters. Freed from dead weight, their effective ROAS jumps immediately — this is where the reporting improvement comes from.
- Your discovery campaign gives everything else a fair, budgeted, time-boxed shot at proving demand before any keep-or-cut decision.
This structure also connects directly to your labelling system: products graduate and demote between campaigns as their performance changes, which is why custom labels should be treated as an ongoing process, not a one-off setup.
A note on Performance Max
If you’re running Performance Max rather than Standard Shopping, the same logic applies but the mechanics differ. You separate discovery products using listing groups and custom labels, and you can run a dedicated discovery pMax campaign or asset group. The key constraint is that pMax controls bidding at the campaign level — you can’t set per-product bids — so your “room to breathe” comes from campaign structure and budget rather than individual bid adjustments. Learn more about structuring Performance Max asset groups by product tier.
Frequently asked questions
Should I exclude non-converting products from Google Shopping? Not as a first step. Excluding everything throws away products that could convert with a fair chance and leaves your account structure unchanged. Instead, separate low-traffic and non-converting products into a dedicated discovery campaign where they get isolated budget and room to prove demand — then exclude only the ones that genuinely fail after a fair window.
What is a Google Shopping discovery campaign? It’s a separate campaign that holds your low-traffic, unproven, and new products, with its own budget and an exploration-friendly bid strategy. It gives those products room to accumulate data without competing against your proven heroes for budget — so you can find out which ones have real demand.
Why do my products get no budget in Google Shopping? Because Smart Bidding sends budget toward products with conversion history. In a mixed campaign, your proven products absorb the budget and unproven ones get starved, never accumulating enough data to prove themselves. Separating them into a discovery campaign fixes this.
How long should a discovery campaign window be? A common approach is 30 days or 50 clicks per product, whichever comes first. The exact numbers depend on your traffic and price points, but the key is to set a defined window up front so every product reaches a clear keep-or-cut decision instead of drifting.
What bid strategy should a discovery campaign use? An exploration-friendly one — Maximise Clicks or a deliberately loose target ROAS. A tight tROAS tells the algorithm to avoid unproven products, which defeats the purpose. You’re buying data, not chasing efficiency.
Next in this cluster: custom labels strategy for Google Shopping and the discovery-clock method for new products (coming soon). Or return to the complete Google Shopping guide for South Africa.
Want help restructuring your Shopping account the right way? Get in touch.
