What is a ‘Zombie’ in Google Ads?

A ‘Zombie’ in Google ads refers specifically to a product in your feed that isn’t receiving any impressions or clicks in Shopping campaign(s) or your Performance Max campaign(s).

I saw a campaign named ‘Zombies’ in an account I worked on recently, and thought wtf, they don’t have any products relating to zombies… Now I know what it means, and it all makes sense.

How do ‘Zombies’ appear in your Google Ads account?

All businesses have better products than others, right? Google will start to learn this as well. Even back in the day when campaigns were manual, Google always ranked ads by quality score. Now, Google favouring certain ads or products is much more prevalent with automated bidding strategies; the algorithm will want to hit targets, and therefore will show the products more likely to get sales - cue, your top products.

This means there will be a number of products that get left behind. However, these are not necessarily bad performing products, they just haven’t had the chance to prove themselves.

How to deal with ‘Zombies’ in your Google Ads account?

The simple answer is to force Google to show these products by setting up an additional campaign for just these zombie products - just like you might set up campaigns for best sellers, or products on offer, etc.

How would you keep the zombie group up to date?

Having to keep checking products and changing the product list all the time sounds like a time-consuming task… but it doesn’t have to be; you can use a script. I’m always up for automation, and for something like this which could get left behind, a script would be the best option.