When advertising discounted products in Google Shopping or Performance Max campaigns, merchants must balance promotional pricing rules with automated bidding mechanics. Running a sale involves coordinating product feed attributes in Google Merchant Center with conversion tracking and bid strategies in Google Ads.
Small e-commerce sellers evaluating store economics often reference an E-commerce Profit Margin Calculator or an E-commerce ROI Calculator alongside their advertising accounts. Ensuring that feed data accurately reflects sale prices protects account compliance, qualifies products for visual search badges, and aligns Smart Bidding algorithms with actual order values.
Submitting Sale Prices in Google Merchant Center
According to Google Merchant Center Help on the sale price attribute, merchants use the optional sale_price attribute to tell customers how much they charge for a product during a sale. During a sale, your sale price is shown as the current price. If the original price and sale price meet certain requirements, the original price may show along with the sale price, so people can view the difference between prices.
To submit sale pricing correctly, merchants must adhere to core feed specifications:
Maintain Base Price: When you submit the
sale_priceattribute, continue to submit the full price of your product (the cost when it is not on sale) by also submitting thepriceattribute. If your product is on sale and you do not submit thesale_priceattribute, you should submit the sale price as the value for thepriceattribute.Price Difference: The product sale price should be less than the price for the product, and this price difference should show in your product data.
Accepted Format: The technical name is
sale_price, and the type is number plus currency (use ISO 4217). In Text (TSV or CSV) data sources, an example format is15.00 USD, and in XML data sources,<g:sale_price>15.00 USD</g:sale_price>. Do not provide more than 2 digits after a decimal; if you include more than 2 digits after the decimal, they are automatically rounded to the nearest acceptable value, such as 1.0234 rounding to 1.02 and 29.8999 rounding to 29.90.Checkout and Landing Page Consistency: Submit a value that matches the sale price you display on your landing page and at checkout. Clearly display both non-sale and sale prices on your landing pages, and only the sale price at checkout. The sale price does not have to be the most prominent price on the landing page; for example, the original price can still be in a larger font.
Coupon Code Requirements: If you advertise a coupon code, ensure that it is accessible to all users. Clearly display both the non-sale price and the sale price after applying the coupon code. Also ensure that the sale price stays consistent throughout checkout.
Scheduling Sale Dates: Submit the
sale_price_effective_dateattribute to indicate when the sale price is relevant; otherwise the sale price will be used for your product immediately.Feature Restrictions: The
sale_priceattribute is not supported for Physical Goods Subscriptions; use thesubscription_costattribute instead. In addition, do not use thesale_priceattribute for loyalty prices requiring membership in a loyalty program; use theloyalty_programattribute instead.
Qualifying for US Sale Price Annotations and Strikethroughs
According to Google Merchant Center Help on sale price annotations, if the sale price and original base price meet certain conditions, both prices and sale price annotations will appear across different Google platforms like Google Search, Shopping ads and the Shopping tab. The sale price will be shown as the current price alongside the original price, which will show with a strikethrough. Your product will also show a badge that highlights your sale.
For Shopping ads in the United States, listings must meet these requirements:
Lower Price: The sale price must be lower than the base price.
Discount Percentage Window: The discount of the sale must be greater than 5% and less than 90%.
Base Price History: The base price of the product must be charged throughout for either duration below, whichever condition is met first: 5 days within the past 30 days (does not need to be 5 consecutive days), or 15 days within the past 200 days (does not need to be 15 consecutive days).
Landing Page Prominence: The original price and sale price should be displayed on the landing page. The active sale price should be the most prominent price on the page. The original price should be less prominent, can be struck through, grayed out, or otherwise displayed to show that it is not currently active.
Sale price annotations are not always guaranteed to show, even if you meet the requirements above. This is because Google wants to ensure that the best performing annotations surface on your offers.
Both sale price annotations and promotions allow merchants to highlight product sales in different ways. While the sale_price attribute can be submitted through the product data source or inventory data source, promotions are a supplemental feature that allow merchants to highlight special offers on their products. Sales prices should not be submitted as promotions.
To check which products are eligible for a sale price annotation, go to Products under Products & store in the left navigation menu in your Merchant Center account, select All products, select the Filter icon, select Has sale badge, choose Yes, and select Apply.
How Target ROAS Bidding Operates During Sales
According to Google Ads Help on Target ROAS bidding, this Smart Bidding strategy analyzes and uses Google's AI to predict the value of a potential conversion every time a user searches for products or services you are advertising. Google's AI adjusts your bids for these searches to maximize your return on them. In practice, if the bid strategy determines that a user search is likely to generate a conversion with high value, Target ROAS will bid high on that search. If this bid strategy determines that the search is not likely to generate a high-value conversion, it will bid low.
Imagine measuring sales for an online women's shoe store where bids are optimized based on the value of a shopping cart total. The assumption is a goal of $5 USD worth of sales (conversion value) for each $1 USD spent on ads. Inputs: $5 USD in sales and $1 USD in ad spend. Formula: $5 USD in sales / $1 USD in ad spend * 100% = 500% target ROAS. Result: a target ROAS of 500%. Google Ads then sets max. CPC bids to maximize conversion value while trying to reach that 500% target ROAS.
Before applying a Target ROAS bid strategy, campaigns must satisfy several requirements:
Conversion Value Setup: You need to set values for the conversions you are tracking. Conversions must have a value greater than 0 to be counted as eligible.
Conversion Volume Thresholds: Search and Shopping campaigns require at least 15 conversions in the past 30 days at the conversion tracking level.
Conversion Value Rules: Advertisers can apply conversion value rules to apply a multiplication factor to conversion values for higher value types of customers, devices, or locations.
Setting Target ROAS: Target ROAS should be set based on your business goals as well as your historical ROAS performance as a reference. To find this, select Modify Columns from the Columns drop-down and add the Conv. value/cost column from the list of Conversions columns, then multiply conversion value per cost metric by 100 to get your Target ROAS percent. The time frame of ROAS evaluation must exclude the most recent conversion delay period to get an accurate view of campaign performance.
Bid Adjustments and Limits: Target ROAS optimizes bids using real-time data, so existing bid adjustments are not used, with the single exception of device bid adjustments of -100%. Setting bid limits for Target ROAS is not recommended because it restricts Google Ads from optimizing your bid using AI.
