Hey guys, Sam here from KeyCommerce.com.
And in this video, I'm going to teach you how
I fix disapproved products in Google Merchant Center.
You may be seeing this in your Google Merchant Center account...
...disapproved items, and you have quite a few.
When this happens to you, your Google Shopping ads stop running for those products.
This means lost sales every single day that you don't fix this.
Google will disapprove your products when they see
that there is an issue with some of the data in your product feed.
Now, my team and I, we fix hundreds of these disapprovals every single week for our clients.
We specialize in running Google Ads campaigns like Google Shopping,
Google search for e-commerce stores...
...and one of our services is actually taking care of your whole Merchant Center account.
So, I've been fixing disapprovals for years
and years, and I'm going to take you through my process right now.
First thing I'm going to do is open up the Google
Merchant Center account and go to 'Products > Diagnostics'.
It's going to open up this dashboard here,
which is going to show you a graph over time of your active items and disapproved items.
You see here, we've had 50 disapproved products, which is about 17% of this store's catalog.
That's a huge amount of products disapproved.
Now, there are many reasons why your products could be disapproved.
But, the good thing is, Google has a lot of helpful documentation to
tell you why it's been disapproved and how you can actually fix it.
So, this is exactly what I do for every single disapproval.
I copy the error name and I just go straight to Google and search for it...
...and the first result here is "How to fix:
Missing value [shipping]", which is the error that we're trying to fix.
On this page, Google outlines how to actually fix this for those products.
Now, from my experience, I know that this is commonly caused
because you don't have account level shipping settings
set up in your Google Merchant Center account.
I have a video that takes you through how to set these up, so I'll leave a link below,
if this is the error that you're experiencing as well.
And I do have tutorials on many of the errors that you might experience.
Regardless, you can search and see here a full tutorial
on how to actually fix this for your store.
Now, how do you know which products to fix?
We go back to the dashboard, and we can click 'View examples'.
Now, you're going to see a big list here of all the different products affected,
the item IDs of those products, and the actual feed that is being affected.
Let's try a new error for this account.
This one here says, "Image not retrieved (crawl pending)".
Google has a bunch of different results for this error, and the second one here
is exactly what we're looking for.
And this is the Google support forum.
Someone else is having the same problem.
Now, often, Google has a support doc for many of the errors.
But, sometimes, you'll find a forum where
people are actually helping each other fix this same disapproval.
This error here, "Image not retrieved (crawl pending)", was likely because
there was some sort of crawl error when your feed was crawled by Google Merchant Center.
You can often fix this by re-crawling the feed, or waiting until it's crawled again later.
This one here, "Violation of shopping ads policy", is a general error.
But, if you click on 'View examples',
and you click on one of the actual products that are being affected by this error,
it's going to tell you, "Violated policies",
"Dangerous products (recreational drugs and drug related equipment)".
Now, this error was an absolute mistake.
This is not a drug related product.
But, Google is classifying it, maybe,
because some keywords or queries that are in the description or title.
So, we would just go through and either appeal that decision,
or we'd actually change the description and title, and get it recrawled again.
So, this is the process of fixing disapprovals.
It's a troubleshooting process where you go through your
account and actually search for all the errors,
find out how to fix each individual one,
and then go through and fix them.
It takes some time, and the first time you do it it might be quite confusing,
but just follow the documentation and just keep Googling.
That's the best way ahead.
Once you fix more and more disapprovals, you'll get used to what the main ones are,
and you'll know how to fix them quite quickly.
Now, if you're watching this video and you're struggling so much,
and you'd rather just have someone else fix these for you,
you can get in touch with my team.
We actually set up, manage, and scale Google Ads accounts,
which includes the Google Merchant Center account as well.
Just get in touch via our website KeyCommerce.com.
I'll also leave a link in the description down below.
If this video was helpful, give it a like,
let me know in the comments below, and check out my other videos.
I make a lot of videos helping you guys
how to grow your ecommerce store with Google Ads and Google Shopping campaigns.
Thanks for watching guys, I'll see you in the next video.
Bye for now.