How to Fix Disapproved Products in Google Merchant Center 2020

 - In this video, I'm gonna show you

how to fix disapproved products in Google Merchant Center.

Let's get into it.

(upbeat music)

- [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 is 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 on 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 from happening again and again.

If you understand this process,

it's just gonna make you

a much better marketer, an 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 into 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 give 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 reality,

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 no 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 the 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 in 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 setup,

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 sorts 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.