One of the most common problems for online store owners who launch Google Shopping campaigns is blocking products in the Merchant Center, which is a serious obstacle to launching impressions and sales of a specific product. It is the product status that determines whether it will be sold or not. And that is why today we will talk about blocking products in the Merchant Center.
Merchant Center product blocking
Blocking a product in the Merchant Center means completely suspending the display of the product until the problem is resolved.
If the earlier version had warnings about blocking the product, now in the Merchant Center Next version - there is information only about blocking. It looks something like this:
If the blocked products are more than 10% of the total, then there is a high probability of blocking the entire Merchant Center account, which completely suspends the work of trading campaigns. There can be many reasons for blocking products, let's go over the most typical ones.
Reasons for blocking products in Merchant Center:
➊ Broken links to products
It's trivial that product pages are unavailable for one reason or another.
➋ Invalid image format or size
Product images do not meet the requirements:
JPEG, WebP, PNG, GIF (without animation), BMP or TIFF 100x100 pixels (for clothing - 250x250) weighing no more than 16 MB.
➌ Advertising overlay on image
Product photos contain inscriptions or unnecessary elements, which is prohibited by Merchant Center policy.
➍ Price or availability discrepancy
The price or status of the product in the feed and on the site have different meanings. It is necessary to find out the reasons why this happens.
➎ Extra text in title, description
Words like “super discount”, “buy now” can be perceived as words that are not related to the product and should be removed.
➏ Product name is too long
The product name must be no more than 150 characters.
➐ Description too long
The product description must be no more than 5000 characters.
➑ Violation of Google rules
The darkest and most unpredictable blocking point. It may include various reasons: prohibited trademarks, distortion of facts, medical topics, adult content, unfair activity, counterfeit goods, gambling, political content, syntax errors, dangerous goods, and so on. More detailed information about possible reasons for blocking according to Google policy is available here.
These are all the main reasons for blocking products, but there may be many more, it all depends on the scale and width of your feed.
You will ask a trivial question:
❓ How to unblock products in Merchant Center?
It's simple:
👉 Follow the Merchant Center prompts. There is simply no “magic” button to unblock.
Some accounts have the option to challenge product moderation, but unfortunately, not all. In most cases, product moderation is carried out automatically, so we strongly recommend following the Merchant Center rules.
There are trivial recommendations from Google specialists on changing IDs, deleting products, but they are not always effective. And this has been tested more than once.
One of the ways to unblock products is to adjust the product on the Merchant Center side, which may look like this:
With this option, you can edit the product based on considerations of passing moderation. Well, and the most important clarification:
Manual product adjustments will be a priority for Merchant Center, despite possible daily feed updates.
By doing the hard work of approving products, increasing the percentage of approved products - you will improve the performance of your campaigns in the Google Shopping direction.
We hope that this material was useful for you. Until next time on our blog.
Order a service