How to revive overlooked ecommerce SKUs with Performance Max

With large ecommerce catalogs, it’s common for products to fall through the cracks. It’s not because they’re bad products or out of stock. They simply stop getting the visibility they need to perform.

As Google’s algorithms optimize toward products with the strongest historical performance, lower-volume SKUs can slowly lose impression share. Less traffic leads to less conversion data, which compounds the issue. Before long, those products are stuck in what I call SKU purgatory.

Instead of letting those products collect dust, my team built a process to bring them back to life, leveraging Performance Max to help with some of the heavy lifting. Let’s look at what it takes to resurrect zombie SKUs, how to implement the campaign, and why it works so well at scale.

Meet the zombie campaign

Zombie SKUs aren’t a new concept, and thankfully, it’s quite simple to understand why this happens and do something proactive to fix it.

My campaign of choice is typically Performance Max (PMax) because this is exactly where Google’s automation can be used to our advantage. PMax can find additional pockets of opportunity and demand that Standard Shopping may not be uncovering. Sometimes that’s all a neglected SKU needs.

When a SKU falls below certain performance thresholds, rather than leaving it inside its existing Standard Shopping campaign, where it continues to receive little to no traffic, we automatically move it into a dedicated zombie SKU Performance Max campaign.

The goal isn’t to force spend on poor-performing products. It’s to give overlooked products another opportunity to compete.

Once those products begin generating impressions, clicks, and even conversion data again, Google’s understanding of them improves. If they prove themselves, they earn their way back into their original campaigns.

How to automate a zombie SKU campaign

Before I started using PMax, I usually found zombie campaigns were more trouble than they were worth because of the time-consuming manual work required to move SKUs in and out of the campaign.

The key was to remove the manual work.

With help from our awesome data team, we built custom logic in BigQuery that continuously identifies what qualifies as a “zombie SKU.” The exact thresholds are customized for each business, but the goal is the same: identify products that have effectively stopped receiving meaningful opportunity.

Here’s how the process works:

• BigQuery evaluates every SKU using our custom logic.
• Eligible zombie SKUs are exported to a Google Sheet.
• Feedonomics (our feed management tool) reads that sheet and automatically…