The problem with relying on ROAS alone
ROAS tells you how efficiently your spend is converting, but what it doesn’t tell you is how much opportunity you’re missing.
Your brand might only be visible (and successful) for a small fraction of relevant searches, your key products are underrepresented, and competitors are constantly outranking you where it matters. And none of that shows up clearly in your standard reporting when having ROAS as your most important (or only) metric, as you’re only looking at a limited slice of the market.
The idea of “invisible lost revenue”
With invisible revenue, we mean revenue that's lost through zero visibility, and not poor conversion.
In electrical ecommerce, this matters more than most categories, as there is a very high intent to buy. If you’re not showing up consistently in those moments, you’re not even in the consideration set, and with that, we mean both in search results and in LLMs.
Customers often know exactly what electrical product they want and how much they are willing to pay for it. They search for specific products after doing research, compare options quickly, and buy from whoever is most visible and competitive.
How competitors quietly take your share without you noticing
This is where electrical brands and retailers get more competitive than they appear on the surface. Two brands can sell the same product, but if only one consistently appears at the top of Google Shopping and the other shows up occasionally, or not at all, a huge gap will widen between the two when looking at clicks, data, performance, and positioning.
Yet it’s so hard to pinpoint exactly when and why this happens. Without visibility into that dynamic, it’s difficult to know it’s even happening at all!
Electrical products are highly comparable. Price, availability, and visibility all play a role, and even delivery cost and time are essential to win customers over from competitors. That means performance isn’t just about how well your campaigns are set up, but also about how often and how prominently your products appear relative to competitors. Even small shifts in visibility can have a meaningful impact on revenue over time, and if you’re only looking at ROAS, those shifts can go unnoticed until performance drops.
What visibility actually means in Google Shopping
Think of visibility as your share of presence across relevant (and converting) searches. Not just whether you appear, but how often and where.
Are you showing for your top products, or are competitors appearing more frequently than you? Are there any high-value searches where you’re missing entirely and not even bidding on?
These are the questions that standard Google Ads metrics don’t fully answer, but that we want to change with the Visibility Tracker. When you introduce visibility tracking, the context of your ads and search terms changes. You can start to understand where your brand is leading, where you are close to being pushed out, and where the opportunities are to take up more space.
We want you to be able to validate when things are going well, and why they are going well, but also provide better visibility before performance goes down so your marketing team is ready before it’s too late.
The takeaway
Strong ROAS doesn’t always mean strong performance; it can often just mean you’re doing well within the space you can currently see. What we want to change is your perspective of what is happening in the market and where the real opportunities for growth are in the markets not seen in Google Ads.
