Google checks the price and availability in your Merchant Center feed against your product pages. Generate the feed automatically from the store, schedule it to update daily, and check the diagnostics every week.

Two prices for one product

Shopping ads, the product listings with a photo and a price above or beside Google's search results, do not come straight from your website.

They come from a product feed, a file listing every item with its price, availability and link. The feed lives in Google Merchant Center, and Google AdWords builds the ads from it.

Google also visits the product pages and compares. When the feed says one price and the page another, or the feed says in stock and the page sold out, the item is disapproved.

Enough disapprovals can bring a warning for the whole account. And for many small shops the feed is a spreadsheet someone updates by hand, once a month if they remember.

How a feed falls behind

The first hurts most, because it happens at the worst time. A shop's busiest weeks are its sale weeks, and that is exactly when a hand-kept feed and the site disagree.

Why Google is strict about it

A Shopping ad promises that the price in it is the price on the page. A shopper who clicks one price and finds another feels misled, and Google's policies exist to stop that.

The check runs both ways. A feed price lower than the page is the obvious problem, but a higher one is flagged too, and so is an item listed as available that cannot be bought.

Disapproved items simply stop showing. The rest of the account keeps running, so the gap is easy to miss unless someone looks.

What an account warning means

Occasional mismatches disapprove single products. Persistent ones across many can lead Google to warn the whole account, and then to suspend it if the data is not fixed.

A suspended Merchant Center account takes every Shopping ad offline, not just the faulty ones. Getting it back means fixing the data and asking for a review.

That is a long fall for a spreadsheet nobody updated.

The warning arrives by email, sometimes at an address set up years ago by a former employee or a developer. Check which addresses Merchant Center uses, and that someone reads them.

A worked example

A blacksmith who makes hooks, fireplace tools, bottle openers and door hardware sells them through a small online shop, and runs Shopping ads each autumn as gift buyers start searching.

The feed was a spreadsheet exported from the shop once, then edited by hand. In October several prices went up after steel costs rose, and a dozen items sold out at a craft fair. The spreadsheet changed in neither case.

Within days Merchant Center had disapproved most of the fireplace tools for mismatched prices, and an email warned that the account could be suspended if the data did not improve.

The developer replaced the spreadsheet with a feed generated by the shop itself, which Merchant Center fetches every morning, so prices and stock now come straight from the store.

The disapprovals cleared once Google rechecked the pages. A reminder sits in the blacksmith's calendar every Monday to read the diagnostics.

Generate the feed from the store

Most shop platforms can produce a product feed automatically, either built in or through an extension, using the same prices and stock levels the shop itself shows.

Merchant Center can fetch that feed from its web address on a schedule. Daily suits most small shops; a shop whose stock changes by the hour may need more frequent updates.

Once the feed is generated rather than typed, a change in the shop is a change in the feed, with nobody needing to remember.

Stock sold in person

Shops that sell at a counter, a market or a fair as well as online have a second gap. An item sold in person stays in stock online until someone changes it.

If the till and the online shop do not share stock counts, make updating the online stock part of closing up, so it is right before the next fetch.

Otherwise a generated feed faithfully reports stock that has already gone home with someone else.

Plan sales in the feed

A feed can carry a sale price alongside the regular one, with the dates the sale starts and ends.

Set those when the sale is planned, not on the morning it starts. The ads move to the sale price on time and back again afterwards, matching the site.

The same goes for the shop: a sale set to end automatically at midnight is more reliable than one somebody has to remember to switch off.

Read the diagnostics weekly

Merchant Center reports problems with the account, the feed and individual items, with a reason for each disapproval.

Look every week and on the first day of any sale. Start with anything listed for the account as a whole, since those are the problems that lead to warnings.

Then read the items: mismatched price, mismatched availability, broken links, missing images. Most have a cause in the shop rather than in Merchant Center.

Fix the cause there, and let the next fetch carry the correction through.

The counter-case

A shop with a few dozen products whose prices rarely change, and which never runs sales, may manage with a carefully kept file and a monthly check.

Some products do not suit Shopping ads at all, such as made-to-order pieces priced by size or finish. Search ads leading to a quote form may serve those better.

And a generated feed is only as good as the shop's own data. Wrong prices in the shop become wrong prices in the ads, faster.

For most shops running Shopping ads, generate the feed from the store, fetch it daily, and read the diagnostics every week.

Before the next sale

  1. Open the diagnostics in Merchant Center today.
  2. Fix disapproved items at their source.
  3. Generate the feed from the shop itself.
  4. Schedule a daily fetch of the feed.
  5. Add sale prices with start and end dates.
  6. Read the diagnostics every Monday.
  7. Check again on the first day of any sale.

Step three removes the problem rather than managing it. A feed typed by hand will always fall behind a shop that changes, however careful the person typing it.

Seeing your ads as searchers see them, without disturbing the figures, is covered in searching for your own ads every morning.

Frequently asked questions

Why are my Shopping products disapproved?

Often because the price or availability in the feed does not match the product page. Google checks the pages and disapproves items where the two disagree.

Can the whole account be affected?

Yes. Persistent mismatches can lead Google to warn the account and, if the data is not fixed, suspend it, which stops every Shopping ad.

How do I keep the feed current?

Generate it from the store automatically and have Merchant Center fetch it on a schedule, daily for most small shops, so changes reach the ads.

How should I handle sale prices?

Add a sale price with start and end dates to the feed when the sale is planned, so the ads change on time and match the site.

How often should I check Merchant Center?

Every week, and on the first day of any sale. Read account problems first, then item problems, and fix their causes in the shop itself.

Do all products suit Shopping ads?

No. Made-to-order pieces priced by size or finish may do better with search ads that lead to a quote form.

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.

Shopping ads fed from a spreadsheet?

Tell us which platform your shop runs on. We will set up a feed that updates itself and clear what Merchant Center is flagging.

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