Are Your Cheap Products Worth Advertising?

A client called me today with a question every e-commerce store owner eventually asks: “Should we keep advertising these low-margin products?”

The products in question sell for a few euros each. The cost of acquiring a customer through Google Ads often exceeds the margin on a single unit. On paper, it looks like a losing proposition.

But that’s the wrong way to look at it.

The real question

The client wasn’t really asking about one product category. She was asking whether people who buy cheap items also buy other things. If a €3 product leads to a €70 order, the math changes completely.

This is something Google Ads can’t tell you. Google sees clicks and conversions. It doesn’t know what else was in the cart, whether the customer came back, or whether the cheap item was the reason they visited the store in the first place.

Getting the answer in one minute

I opened NCM and ran a basket analysis on the product category over the last 90 days. The results came back immediately:

• 96 orders contained these products out of 745 total (about 13% of all orders)
• Average order value: €76.57 (median €60.40)
• Customers spent an average of €20 on the category per order
• 89 out of 96 orders were mixed, meaning customers bought these items alongside higher-margin products
• Only 7 orders consisted mainly of the low-cost items, and even those averaged €73.40

The answer was clear: these products are basket builders, not standalone purchases. People who add them to their cart spend €77 on average.

What this means for ad strategy

Knowing this changes how you run campaigns. Instead of evaluating ads on their direct ROAS alone, you factor in the full basket. A click that costs €1.50 and leads to a €3 sale looks unprofitable. A click that costs €1.50 and leads to a €77 mixed order looks very different.

This also affects bidding strategy. You might set lower target ROAS for these campaigns specifically because you know the indirect value is high. Or you might use low-cost products as entry points in Performance Max campaigns, knowing they pull higher-value items into the cart.

Why this matters

Most e-commerce businesses make decisions based on per-product metrics. But customers don’t buy one product at a time. They build baskets. Understanding which products drive larger orders is the difference between cutting a profitable campaign and scaling it.

The data was always there in WooCommerce. It just wasn’t accessible in a way that answered the question. NCM pulled 90 days of order data, cross-referenced it with product categories, and produced a clear report in under a minute. No spreadsheets, no manual exports, no waiting for a weekly report.

That’s the kind of analysis that should inform every campaign decision. And it should take seconds, not hours.