What happened
Google Ads added two metrics to Shopping reporting: Product Clicks and Non-Product Clicks. The first counts clicks on the product listing itself. The second counts clicks on other elements of the ad. Until now both landed in a single clicks column, and you read the total as product interest because that was the only reading available.
It's a reporting change, not a bidding one — about what you can see, not what the algorithm does with it. Search Engine Roundtable surfaced the addition, and like most reporting rollouts it will show up account by account rather than everywhere at once.
Why this matters
A blended click count made certain diagnoses impossible. A product with strong clicks but weak conversion looked like a landing-page problem or a price problem. But if a chunk of those clicks never expressed interest in the product at all — they were taps on other parts of the ad — the diagnosis changes. Some of your traffic winners have been collecting engagement that had nothing to do with the listing.
The split also hands feed work a cleaner scoreboard. Product Clicks are the direct read on whether your title and image pull shoppers in — the two assets you actually control in a Shopping ad, and the two your feed determines. When you test a rewritten feed title or a new lead image, product-click rate is now the metric that answers the question without non-product noise blurring the result. For BigCommerce stores mid-way through feed cleanup, that's a before-and-after measurement you didn't have last month.
One honest caveat: "other elements of the ad" is a broad bucket, and Google may refine what falls into it as this rolls out. Until the taxonomy firms up in your own account, treat early ratios as provisional. The direction of the split is useful before the fine print is.
What to do about it
Re-baseline Shopping CTR when the metrics land
Export current click totals before the split reaches your reporting, then annotate the account the day Product and Non-Product Clicks appear. Every trend comparison that crosses that date needs the asterisk, or you'll read a definition change as a performance change and chase a ghost.
Re-audit your problem-product list
Once you have a few weeks of data, sort products by non-product click share. A high share means the interest you credited to that product was partly noise — recheck whether it's really a landing-page fix you need, or a price-competitiveness problem you've been misfiling as a creative one.
Point feed tests at product-click rate
If you're rewriting feed titles or swapping lead images, measure against product-click rate instead of blended CTR. It's the closest thing Shopping gives you to a pure creative metric, and it just got a lot less polluted.
Fold the split into whatever reporting you send up
If Shopping numbers reach a boss, a client, or a P&L review, add the product versus non-product breakdown the first month it's available and explain the re-baseline once. Ten minutes of preemption beats a quarter of answering why CTR suddenly looks different.