- In this video, I'm gonna show you
how to fix disapproved products in Google Merchant Center.
Let's get into it.
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- [Man] Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
- All right, so you're having problems
with Google Merchant Center
and getting your products approved.
So, it's really important to keep in mind
how Merchant Center actually works
and why it even exists.
So, with regular ads in Google Search, you write your ad
and then boom, you can put it right onto the search results
and start paying for clicks right away,
there's no pause there.
With Google Shopping Ads, it's really important for Google
to maintain the integrity of their search listings,
so they have a review process for Google Shopping products
to make sure that everything looks good on Google Shopping.
This means that instead of just
creating your products on Google Shopping
or creating your Google Shopping ads,
you need to create a Google Merchant Center account,
get your feed uploaded into Merchant Center
or connected in with Shopify
or WooCommerce or whatever you're using
and then make sure it's all approved before the connection
and those products will go into Google Ads
and then live on the Google Shopping network.
So, to get your Google Shopping ads live,
you need to create a Google Merchant Center account,
hit your feed, import into Merchant Center,
get it all approved in Merchant Center,
all those products, all the information
before Google will let you show those ads
on Google Ads and the search results
and it's a real pain in the butt
to get them approved at the start,
especially when you're starting out,
'cause you're just learning how this whole thing works,
how all the systems connect together
and maybe you're running into problems here
where things are getting disapproved and you don't know why.
I'm going to show you what I do
to get products approved quickly
and even how I call Google to talk to them myself.
A pro-tip before we get started
is that even if your products are being disapproved,
sometimes it's not all products,
yes, sometimes that happens,
but sometimes, it's only a few products
in your feed that are getting disapproved.
I recommend starting your Google Shopping campaign anyway
so that those products that are approved can start showing
and you can get data for those products.
This is really important, because you don't wanna be
waiting to start your whole campaign
just for a few products to get approved,
when some products can start getting data,
clicks, impressions, conversion data right away.
So, while we're working on the feed,
some products are still churning away,
getting that conversion data
and starting to get you sales for your eCommerce store.
So even though there are
common reasons for product disapprovals,
what's really important here
is for you to learn how to think like a marker,
think like a problem-solver in this occasion,
because hopefully, this won't be your last store,
you'll keep making more stores
and you'll have to go through this process
with every new store that you get onto Google Shopping Ads.
There are a lot of reasons why products get disapproved,
but what's even more important is that
you go through a process of troubleshooting
and problem-solving with your feed.
Google's gonna give you your error or warning
or whatever diagnostic knowledge that it can give you
and you need to use that to figure,
okay, what is actually the problem here?
So, you can actually download the data as well,
they will show you the actual
warnings and errors for each product.
What you wanna do there is look at that and go,
okay, what's the problem here, how can I fix this
and what I really recommend doing
is going to Google and Googling the error,
seeing what other people have done,
there are lots of forums out there.
Yes, I can give you a list of problems
and I'm gonna do that in a moment,
but if you can learn how to do this,
because you might have some errors
that only a few people have ever had
and there's someone probably talking about it on some forums
and so then you can solve that really quickly
and you'll know for next time
with the way that you set up your store
how to stop those problems happening again and again.
If you understand this process,
it's just gonna make you
a much better marketer, eCommerce marketer
and it's gonna make things much easier as you keep going.
Something that's gonna help a lot is that
you don't have to wait 'til tomorrow
before you can actually see if
the changes that you made to your feed
actually approved the products
or Google approved those products,
what you can do is just go in to the products
and re-fetch the feed,
I'll show you right now on the screen,
go in, re-fetch the feed,
wait, it only takes a few minutes,
three to five minutes or so and refresh
and you'll see that Google has
likely just approved the product
or given you some sort of other error
that you need to work through.
Keep doing this process,
see the error, Google,
find a solution, make changes, re-fetch,
re-fetch, keep doing this, again, re-fetch,
change, re-fetch, change, re-fetch
and through this process,
you'll start clearing all those errors
and all your products will be approved
and that's when you know that then
within 24 to 48 hours,
those products are gonna be shown on Google Shopping
as long as you've set up
your Google Shopping campaign in Google Ads.
Another thing that a lot of people don't know
is that you can actually call Google
and speak to their Shopping Team
and they can help you get your products approved.
Now, this can be amazing when you're stuck,
you don't know what the problem is
and it keeps getting disapproved
and you don't know where to solve it.
Well, they often have extra information
and knowledge about your exact problem
and I've done this a couple of times
when I've been absolutely stuck,
when it's not giving me enough information
about why something isn't being approved
and I've called the number
and they've just said, yep, here it is on my system,
I can see the problem, go and fix this
and boom, I was able to fix it
and saved me a lot of pain.
Now, I'm gonna leave a link in the description
to a page that has a lot of the contact numbers
for all the different countries for Google
and you can even call one in a different country
if it's in the same, if it's open in the timezone,
so say if you're working late at night
because you work during the day at your job
and then you work on your eCom store at night,
you can call another one that's in Australia, UK, wherever,
that's on a different timezone,
and this can be really helpful
to get your products approved really quickly,
so that's what I recommend, that's a good tip.
Okay, now I'm gonna go over some really common errors
you might be having in your Merchant Center.
One: incorrect product availability.
Okay, this is caused because in your feed,
it's saying in stock,
but then on your website, it's out of stock,
so there's a mismatch here between
what your feed is saying and what your site is saying,
this might occur because you've got a Google Sheets feed
or your feed in WooCommerce or Shopify
isn't actually feeding in
the correct information into Merchant Center.
So, the cool thing is that Merchant Center sometimes
will actually update this automatically in your feed,
but I do recommend that you have some sort of dynamic feed
that does update this automatically,
just so that you don't have any problems
where Google might penalize you for that
or it might show that it's in stock
and you'll be paying for clicks
even though it's out of stock.
So, that's something that's really, really important
and it's really easy to fix.
Short-term, you can fix this really quickly
by just changing the feed so it says
out of stock for those items,
and if you're regularly checking
your Merchant Center disapprovals,
you can just change this really,
really quickly as it happens,
but I do recommend that dynamic feed.
Number two is invalid images.
This can be caused by things such as a low-resolution image,
the image isn't in the right format
or the URL that you put in for your image link
isn't actually an image,
maybe the image is actually
not up to the standards that Google has
and they do have pretty strict standards for that.
What I would recommend doing is
downloading all the product data,
it'll actually have a diagnostics
that you can download in Merchant Center,
seeing which products have this error
and then going in and checking your feed
and seeing the image URL that you have for that product,
importing it into the search bar
and then seeing, is it actually an image?
For example, sometimes Shopify actually puts in
a little string at the end of the URL
for shopping the images.
What I recommend is leaving that out
so it just gets only, just the image
and there's not query or anything else after that URL
and trying that as the actual URL for the image.
If that image isn't working,
I recommend using a different image or uploading a new image
and in Shopify, you can do this by going to admin/files,
I'll put a link on the screen right now,
but you can go to that link, upload a new image
and copy the URL there and use that instead,
so it doesn't have to be an image
that's on your product page,
this is a cool little tip too.
Mistake number three is incorrect price.
This is when your feed pricing
doesn't match the pricing that's on your website
and as well, Google will sometimes auto-update this,
but it's much better to actually have this live,
have a dynamic feed that updates
and if you are using a static feed, like Google Sheets,
make sure that when you update your website pricing,
you remember to update the feed as well in Google Sheets.
It's really simple, just update the pricing
and try again, re-fetch.
Problem number four is the incorrect landing page URL.
Okay, this is pretty simple,
it just means that whatever page
that you've got set as the product link,
the actual landing page they go to isn't the right page,
maybe you put the wrong product page
in there for a different product,
maybe it's a 404 page,
maybe the product is actually unpublished
or unavailable in your eCommerce platform
and so when Google tries to crawl it,
they're not getting the data that they need,
it doesn't match the feed,
so go and just check your feed,
see the URL you have there
and even try it in an incognito window
or some sort of other computer or somewhere else
that you're not logged into your platform
to see, can Google actually access that page.
If you're still having problems,
you can also clone the product, or create a new product page
and then fill in the information again
and see if that works,
maybe it was a problem with that certain page, who knows?
Keep trying stuff like that and see if that can work.
Problem number five,
and this is a really frustrating problem,
is problems with your MPN or GTIN.
Okay, so what are these?
MPN and GTIN, they are used in conjunction with your brand
and it gives Google a better idea
of what your product actually is.
It's basically an identifying number for your product,
so someone else might have another store
that sells the same products.
Maybe you have your own products,
but a lot of people sell someone else's products,
maybe, for example, cameras
and if you put the GTIN of that camera,
that's the official GTIN,
it means Google has seen this product
advertised all around the world
and it has a much better idea of what that product is.
That's gonna make its job much easier to figure out
who's actually searching for your products
and getting those initial clicks.
If you don't put this information in, that's fine,
you can actually get a custom GTIN
or just put in the MPN with the brand, that can work too,
but Google will say here what the actual problem is
and this is a really common problem,
especially for new users of
Merchant Center and Google Shopping Ads.
You just need to update that GTIN,
I would recommend starting off MPN,
which you can have any,
you can even put the SKU in there if you like,
try that out and put your brand name in there
just so that you can get it approved
and get those ads going.
What I do recommend is eventually getting
a GTIN for yourself, that's really important.
If you actually can get the GTIN of the actual product,
say if it is a camera or it's a phone
or whatever you're selling,
that's gonna help as well in another way
because it means that if there are
any reviews around the world
from other shopping stores that have that same product GTIN,
it's also gonna show on your ads.
Your disadvantage here, though,
and I've seen this with some of our clients,
is that if you have got an amazing brand
and you're using the GTIN of a product
but other stores, they can actually
kind of hijack those reviews,
so you spent all this time getting great reviews.
Well, a competitor can then show that same product,
they might not have a strong brand
but then Google Shopping is gonna
show the reviews for that product, your reviews,
but because it's the same product, Google's like,
okay, well, we're gonna show those reviews anyway
'cause it's the same product.
Okay, there's a lot to get into here,
it deserves its own video,
but for GTIN and MPN problems,
I'm gonna put a link in the description to a Google page
that talks a bit more about this question here as well.
So, check the description box for that link.
Okay, problem number six is
missing shipping or tax information.
This is super common, but it's a very straightforward fix.
This means going into
your shipping settings in Merchant Center
and your tax settings, your business settings
and make sure that's up to date, accurate
and reflects what's actually on your store.
Keep in mind that sometimes,
if you put shipping information in your product feed,
that's actually gonna override the Merchant Center settings
that you put in your shipping settings in Merchant Center.
All you really have to do
is just make sure that your shipping settings
match what you're actually shipping.
That's really, really important.
If you're having shipping differences between each product,
put them in the feed,
but just make sure that they're accurate.
I'm gonna put a link in the description
to a video that I did on shipping settings
and getting them all set up,
so hit the description, go check it out
if you wanna see how to set that up properly as well.
Error number seven is prohibited or restricted products.
Okay, you probably know this already,
but Google has very strict restrictions
on products that are deemed dangerous
or unacceptable or anything like that,
they get very careful about sensitive topics,
which I understand,
but it's something you need to be aware of
if you're going into that realm.
Products like guns, bombs, explosives,
drugs, anything like that, just
you can't really advertise that stuff on Google Shopping
and if you do, even if it's something like alcohol,
there's a lot of policies around
that you need to be aware of.
I'll put a link to a list of
dangerous products and services in the description.
Check that out, it'll have a bit more information
from Google about those sort of services.
If you are trying to get illegal drugs
approved on Google Merchant Center,
I would stop, reconsider your life choices
and pick another niche for your eCommerce store.
Okay, now that we've got
all our products approved in Merchant Center,
I really recommend that you check Merchant Center
at least once per week.
Set a time in your calendar
where you just jump in for two minutes
and make sure that everything is approved.
Google will often email you
if your products get disapproved,
but I see that a lot of times,
this email gets missed or they don't send it,
so just keep this in your calendar and just check this,
because if those products go down,
if they get disapproved on Merchant Center,
your ads stop for that product,
and if it's generating a lot of revenue,
boom, sales will stop from Google Shopping,
you'll lose those sales and you don't need to do that,
you just need to check and make sure that
that stuff doesn't get disapproved.
Okay, that's it for this video,
if you found this video helpful,
please give it a thumbs up.
Otherwise, if you have any questions at all,
leave them in the comments and
I'll respond and answer them the best I can.
If you want to see more videos like this,
please subscribe and I look forward to seeing you next time.
Bye for now.
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