Zac Stafford posted a screenshot on Twitter of his client's ads showing negative prices in the Google Search shopping ad results. He said Google auto generated promotions using old codes with discounts greater than the product value.
You can see here, that the Jellycat pacifier normally costs $20 but with a code, you will be paid $27.95 to buy this. Here is the screenshot:
Zac said his client was very unhappy and disappointed with this outcome.
The best part, it seems like Google did this automatically using the Google Ads machine learning stuff. Here is a screenshot from Zac showing "modified by Google."
Not a good thing - I wonder if Google has an explanation for this?
Here is Google's response:
Two things to clarify: 1. “Modified by Google” means the title of the promo was revised for clarity, but we don’t generate or modify offers themselves. 2. If a merchant promotion has a net discount greater than a threshold, it'll be disabled by our systems (which happened here)
— Ginny Marvin (@GinnyMarvin) December 3, 2021
Forum discussion at Twitter.