They say you have to spend money to make money. That’s true if your dollars are being put to good use. Large retailers can spend up to $50 million per year on paid search in Google Ads yet don’t have the conversions and sales to show for it.
The sad truth is that much of that spending is wasted through the mismanagement of Google Merchant Center (GMC). Anyone who has worked with GMC knows exactly what this means. Receiving the GMC warning email that a product is disapproved is the equivalent of spending hours cooking dinner only to have it come out of the oven burnt – a huge waste of time and resources with nothing to show.
But don’t blame the chef. Managing product content on Google Merchant Center is a huge undertaking, and it’s only becoming more complex. Google releases new updates to its Merchant Center product data specifications multiple times a year. Looking at 2023 alone, Google expanded the list of countries where shipping cost is required (June 2023), extended the expiration of offers based on website crawls (July 2023), and disapproved products that misuse outofstock availability (September 2023). Keeping up with these changes has become nearly impossible, preventing companies from getting their products and ads live faster, if at all.
What are the top reasons for Google Merchant Center warnings?
Following a long list of specifications, Google only approves products that come with high-quality product content. Product data needs to be added to Google Merchant Center according to its specific formats while maintaining accuracy and consistency across all other online channels.
Some of the most common reasons businesses see their products rejected are,
- Discrepancies in product price
- Discrepancies in product availability
- Lack of Google categories
- Incorrect category names
- Generic or incorrect product identifiers
- Improper formatting for product titles, descriptions, and images
- Single domain for targeting multiple countries
Failure to comply with the above guidelines results in products receiving the stamp of disapproval, which means immediate removal from ads and listings. However, it doesn’t just stop at the quality of the data. Google is also big on timeliness and ready to hand out penalties if up-to-date product data isn’t uploaded quickly.
While these may sound like technical errors, they have a significant impact on the business. Slower time-to-market, stagnant scalability, competitive disadvantage, and wasted ad spend are some of the threats imposed by insufficient product content.
From product rejections to approvals: Productsup’s GMC Integration
Identifying these Google pain points, our team engineered an integration that makes working with Google Merchant Center effortless. The Productsup Google Merchant Center Integration provides a direct connection between our customers’ product content and GMC. Instead of having to build a custom integration that takes time to implement and requires constant work, the Productsup GMC Integration is readily available to our Advertising PX customers and enables the following functions:
- Automated product data management: The integration automates the process of uploading, updating, and managing product data in Google Merchant Center, which ensures product content is always accurate and up-to-date without manual intervention.
- Inventory synchronization: Users can synchronize inventory information between their internal systems and Google Merchant Center in real time. This ensures their customers see the most up-to-date product availability and pricing.
- Bulk product updates: Accomplishing more with less, the integration can easily make bulk updates to product listings, including changes to titles, descriptions, prices, and images. This is especially useful during sales events or when updating product catalogs.
- Delta updates: The API streamlines and speeds up the upload process by identifying which items have been added, modified, or left unchanged. Users leveraging the GMC API Integration will only see updates made to the changed items instead of their entire product catalog.
Gain 6 times more efficiency in managing Google Merchant Center
The GMC Integration enables businesses to operate more efficiently and improve data quality using Google Merchant Center. For instance, one of our customers reduced the time it takes to upload new products to Google from 9 hours to 90 minutes – six times as fast!
With higher efficiency and better product content coming from GMC across all Google platforms (ie. Google Shopping, Google Ads, Google Local Inventory Ads, etc.), businesses stand to benefit from:
- Faster time-to-market
- Increased visibility
- Expanded customer reach
- Improved conversion rates
- Lower costs
- Eliminated Google penalties
- Higher scalability
- Increased productivity
- Boosted customer satisfaction
Start using the Google Merchant Center Integration with Advertising PX
The Google Merchant Center Integration is available through Productsup’s Advertising PX offering, a feed management solution within its Product-to-Consumer (P2C) platform. It provides a simple and fast way to aggregate, manipulate, and distribute product content across multiple advertising channels and social media platforms, empowering companies to sell more, sell faster, and reach more consumers on more channels.