We talk a lot about ROAS being a misunderstood KPI to work with in Google Ads. And the fact is that most marketing teams running Google Ads for electrical ecommerce are working with the same set of metrics as everyone else, and only for their own campaigns.
And on the surface, that makes sense. CPA, impression share and ROAS are valuable numbers that define performance for your company's targets, and it makes sense to track them. But they don’t tell the full story, as they don’t tell you what’s happening around you.
There is a gap in how performance is measured
When you look at your Google Ads account as a basis for your tracking, you’re only seeing your version of events. You can clearly see what YOU spent, what YOU generated, and how YOUR campaigns performed.
But what about everyone else? Who outranked you when ROAS crashed? Which terms are your biggest competitor focusing on? Google doesn't give insight into your current competitors, where you are losing visibility and how you perform across key products. With electrical products being so nuanced to specific detail, seeing this as part of a bigger context matters a lot.
Why is market visibility more important in electrical categories?
Electrical products tend to be highly competitive and highly comparable, and also more expensive than the average purchase. Which means customers will do their research in specific detail before clicking any ad for the product they finally settle on.
That means your competition can easily become retailers selling the exact same product, using aggressive pricing strategies and marketplaces with huge visibility advantages.
If you don’t understand where your company or brand stand in that very crowded landscape, it’s difficult to make a confident decision on your marketing budget.
What visibility tracking changes for electrical brands
Without a clear view of the market, optimisation easily becomes messy. You can only base your budgets on what you see, and when performance drops, you automatically increase bids, or ROAS fluctuates, so you try a different strategy or reduce spend on converting products.
Our aim in providing the Visibility Tracker is for our clients to control performance rather than just chasing quick sales when they've already fallen. Visibility tracking adds that missing layer and gives you a clearer picture of how your products are performing in the wider market, not just within your account.
You can start to understand which products you dominate and where competitors are pushing you out, and also how your visibility changes over time especilly during big yearly events for electrical sales like Black Friday.
Only a few marketers look at the whole picture of why these changes are happening. All of the above can be explained by a new competitor entering the market and becoming aggressive, or demand has shifted elsewhere, which can be clearly seen in our Visibility Tracker.
How does visibility tracking fit alongside Google Ads and feed optimisation?
Visibility tracking isn’t a replacement for Google Ads or feed optimisation, BUT it strengthens both. Visibility tracking helps you understand where to focus your efforts so your feed becomes more relevant, where to concentrate your bidding strategy and together build a better system of better decisions.
In practise, for electrical retailers, this leads to more focused investment and instead of spreading budget evenly, you can prioritise high-value products where visibility is low, categories where competitors are gaining ground and opportunities where small changes can unlock growth. This level of clarity is not available to most marketing teams.
The takeaway
Google Ads data tells you how you’re performing, but visibility data tells you why. That’s the short answer. With e-commerce being such an extremely competitive category, that extra bit of insight matters. We want you to make ad decisions with confidence and fully identify the market you’re in.
Instead of reacting to sudden dips in ROAS when a competitor gets aggressive, you can now anticipate them. When visibility is dropping on key electrical products, you can act before bigger revenue is impacted.
With such an extremely competitive market often having ads for identical products, it’s essential to spot competitors gaining ground, so you can respond strategically rather than blindly increasing spend. It turns paid media from something you manage into something you actively control.
