A buyer clicks a Shopping ad for a pallet truck, a paving pack or a workwear line. The landing page still says available. The warehouse said no three days ago. Sales spends the afternoon apologising. Finance wonders why paid search “does not work”. The auction did exactly what it was told. The feed lied.
At Pasecom we are an AI and PPC company equally. Senior bidding matters. So does availability truth. This note is for manufacturers and distributors — especially around Hinckley, Leicester, Derby, Nottingham and Coventry — who run Google Shopping or Microsoft product ads and keep discovering that the catalogue on the screen is not the catalogue on the shelf.
What actually goes wrong
Shopping and Performance Max do not invent stock levels. They read attributes you (or your feed tool) send: availability, quantity, price, identifiers, title, shipping. When those attributes drift from the warehouse system, ads keep spending on SKUs you cannot fulfil. Common failure modes:
- Nightly feed still marks in stock after a pick wiped the bin
- Website shows “available” from a cached catalogue while Merchant Center is a second, older CSV
- Variants and pack sizes share one ID, so one dead size keeps siblings live
- Returns and goods-in never update the feed the same day sales promise delivery
- Someone paused a SKU in Google Ads but left it live in Merchant Center — or the reverse
- Microsoft’s product ads still mirror last month’s Google truth after a stock change
None of that is fixed by raising target ROAS. Bidding on false inventory is paying Google to annoy customers.
Why SMEs hit this harder than big retail
Large retailers often have a single inventory service feeding site, app and ads. East Midlands SMEs usually have a frankenstein: Sage or Xero for money, a stock module or spreadsheet for bins, a website catalogue someone updates when they remember, and a Merchant feed exported from “whatever the web agency left running”. The person who knows the truth is on the forklift. The person who pays for ads is in the office. The middle is empty.
Plant, trade, workwear and paving-adjacent ranges make it worse. Heavy SKUs, seasonal lines, specials and “similar to” substitutes mean a wrong click is expensive. A consumer fashion brand can soft-sell an alternative. A distributor quoting a council or a contractor cannot casually substitute a different load rating and hope nobody notices.
Bidding will not save a lying feed
Performance Max and Smart Shopping are useful when the feed, the creative and the exclusions are honest. They are dangerous when availability is fiction. Automation optimises toward whatever converts in the data — including “add to basket then refund” and phone enquiries that become complaints. Brand exclusions and search themes matter; they do not invent stock.
A senior PPC retainer can pause obvious waste, tighten negatives and protect brand. It cannot, by itself, invent a live link between the warehouse and Merchant Center. That is why stock-to-ads sits on the AI automation page as a named workflow, and why twin doors exist: paid search and practical automation solve different halves of the same commercial problem.
What “availability truth” looks like in practice
Start with one source of stock that operations already trust — not a new dashboard. Connect that source to the website catalogue and the Merchant feed on a schedule that matches how fast your bins move. For many distributors that is several times a day, not once a week. Rules should be boring and checkable:
- Below threshold quantity → out of stock in feed and on site
- Discontinued → remove or permanently pause, do not leave “limited availability” theatre
- Human approval before auto-changing price or customer-facing promises that affect margin
- Audit log of what changed, when, and which SKU — so you can kill the workflow if it misfires
AI helps with the repetitive join: read stock, update attributes, flag mismatches, draft a pause list for a person to confirm on money-adjacent decisions. People still own stock write-offs, customer substitutions and anything that hits the bank. That is the same approval rule we use on invoices and quotes — see AI for manufacturers, in plain English.
How PPC and AI should sit together
On the PPC side: Merchant Center diagnostics, item disapproval clean-up, Shopping and PMax structure that respects brand and high-intent queries, Microsoft product ads that do not diverge into a second lie, and weekly search-term discipline so you are not paying for curiosity about dead lines. On the AI side: stock-to-ads sync, inbox routing when “is it in yet?” floods sales, and ask-the-business questions that answer “what is on backorder” from clean data.
You can keep an existing ads agency and still fix the middle. You can take a PPC retainer and add an AI First Job when the feed is the bottleneck. You should not pretend a £1,250 Focus retainer magically includes a full warehouse integration — that work is scoped on the AI page (from £999 per month, and we can build as needed). Honest scopes beat bundled fiction.
Organic and AIEO still need the same truth
Product pages that claim stock Google can cite in AI Overviews will hurt you if the claim is false. SEO & AIEO for catalogue SMEs is datasheet-grade clarity — model, spec, limits — plus entity consistency. It is not a licence to publish fantasy availability. Ads search terms that convert should match the words on the page; the page should match the warehouse. When those three diverge, you pay twice for a muddle. More on the organic pillar: SEO & AIEO.
A sensible first week if this sounds familiar
- Export the top spending Shopping / product SKUs for the last 30 days
- Check each against warehouse quantity and the website today — not last month’s spreadsheet
- Count how many “in stock” ads point at empty bins
- Fix the worst offenders manually in Merchant Center the same day
- Decide whether the ongoing join is a person with a checklist, a feed tool rule, or a practical AI workflow with approval
Do that before you raise budgets. Do that before you blame the algorithm. Do that before you commission a vanity ROAS report. We do not invent performance metrics on public pages; the only numbers that matter are the ones in your login and on your warehouse floor.
Who should act now
- East Midlands distributors and manufacturers with live Shopping or product ads
- Workwear, plant, trade and paving-adjacent catalogues with fast-moving or seasonal lines
- Owners who hear “the website said you had it” more than once a month
- Teams where Microsoft product ads still run after Google was cleaned — or the reverse
You can wait if you have no Merchant Center access yet — get the login first — or if stock is already unified and the pain is pure bidding. If the pain is broken promises, start with truth in the middle.
Next step
Bring a sample of high-spend SKUs, how stock is recorded today, and whether Google or Microsoft (or both) carry the catalogue. We will say whether the fix is feed hygiene inside a PPC retainer, an AI stock-to-ads First Job, or both. Direct: contact form · AI automation · PPC retainers · pete@pasecom.co.uk · Advice Hub.