Problem description
With a recent client, I discovered an interesting problem. The stock levels on specific products would change dramatically throughout the day. It could be in-stock for 15 minutes, out of stock for 4 minutes, then in stock again for 1 hour and out of stock for 4 hours.
My initial analysis showed that advertising these products when they were out of stock brought zero benefit to the advertiser. This means we needed to pause the ads during out-of-stock periods, but since the availability changed so frequently, there was no way a human could keep up with it.
I decided to create an automation to handle this.
For this particular client, I had to consider several challenges.
Requirements
- The inventory would come back in stock at different levels throughout the day.
- Products would go out of stock for varying periods – sometimes minutes, sometimes days.
- There were multiple providers selling the same products, but I didn’t want to promote all of them.
- It needed a reliable way to check current stock status as frequent as possible
- It needs to work around Google Ads script runtime limitations.
The Solution
To make it simple, I built a Google Ads script that checks the current stock status of products and automatically enables or disables campaigns based on inventory levels at specific providers.
When all the conditions are met, I can advertise the product with a 500% ROAS, completely hands-free.
If this sounds like something you’d like to implement at your company, reach out and I can help solve this problem for you 🙂
