Google Merchant Center Next (GMC Next), which has replaced Google Merchant Center, can be difficult to navigate and find what you really need, as tools and alerts seem to be all over. I shared the four things you need to do when you first get added or create a GMC Next account in part one of this deep dive series. In this edition, I’ll be sharing where the feeds are, how to view the products, and how to see any issues in the feeds.
Where Did the Feeds Go?
The first thing is finding the feed itself. In GMC, you could easily access the feeds in the left-hand navigation under the Products section. In GMC Next, feeds have been moved to the Settings Gear in the upper right-hand corner, under Data Sources.
On the Data Sources page, you’ll see two sections. The top part has the items that Google has found by scraping the structured data of your website, and the second section is any feed sources that you have shared through Content API, scheduled fetches, or feed pushes.
In the screenshot above, you’ll see that Google has found an additional 423 products on the website and that I’m submitting 260 items to GMC Next directly via feed file.
For this client, I’m specifically only submitting 260 items, as those are the items we want Google to show in Shopping Ads and free listings. In this example, this account has a number of very low-cost parts that are add-on items, not key items.
That’s different from the client below.
For this client, I’m specifically loading 143 products via Google Sheets that are used for Shopping Ads. However, the 3,087 items Google found on the site are only available to be shown in the free listings. To check that, I can click the name of the source file and see that the marketing method is listed as Free listings.
After you’ve figured out where the feeds are, now you can look at the products themselves, and getting to the products is still in the left-hand navigation. Once there, you can see a list of the products.
There are a few icons that can make your life a little easier there (outlined in red).
- The magnifying glass: this is a quick search function that uses simple ‘include’ logic from a list of eight attributes, like title, brand, product ID, etc. So I can quickly search for all products with the word ‘gold’ in the title or a specific brand.
- The funnel: this allows for more complex filtering, using a preset list of options for things like availability or logic like ‘equals,’ ‘contains,’ ‘starts with,’ etc. Unfortunately, it does not include the ability to filter by “custom labels” and some other attributes that might exist in the feed. Hopefully, this will be fixed soon. However, being able to filter by Marketing Method is important because it’s helpful to filter by Shopping Ads versus Free Listings versus Dynamic Remarketing when evaluating the products.
- The three columns: this allows you to customize the columns in your Product page view; again, “custom labels” are missing, as are some other options. But, it can be very helpful to add certain columns to make it easier to sort and analyze.
- The download: this one really needs help from Google, as the file that gets loaded is in a .tsv format, which makes it harder to open than it needs to be; switching this to a .csv or Google Sheet would be very helpful. Also note that even if you have a filter on or have only certain columns selected, it does not matter to download – you’ll get everything in the feed.
Needs Attention
While you are still on the Products page, an important place to look is under Needs Attention.
Filtering for Marketing Methods can be very important, as I’ll show. If I had my filter set to Marketing methods: All, I see I have a lot of issues – 16 of them in total.
Looking at them, I see that 565 have price issues, 457 have product issues, and so on.
But, if I switch my Marketing methods to Shopping Ads, you can see I have just two on six products.
The vast majority of the products that have issues are ones Google scrapes from the client’s website. The ones that are important to the client are the ones that affect the Shopping ads, and those are the ones I can concentrate on getting fixed.
Google is also notorious for disapproving products for Dynamic Remarketing ads if they are in any sensitive categories, so you can see many more disapprovals than you can do anything about if you don’t filter your marketing methods.
Once you narrow down your disapproval list, you can then view the products, and then select a product to go into.
For the product above, Google is disapproving this Alabama state flag, as they consider it dangerous, derogatory, and inappropriate. If I click the Needs Attention link, it will show me the issues and allow me to request a review:
Unfortunately, Google has no way to do bulk reviews. So, each individual “needs attention” item per product has to be manually requested, as does each product. This is incredibly tedious, and there’s no way to get a human to intervene when it’s clearly something that’s an issue – like the state flag of Alabama.
Setup and Policy Issues
Sometimes, you have account-wide issues, such as when you might have received a suspension notice or have already been suspended. You can find that information under View setup and policy issues on the Products page.
Clicking it will bring you to a page that will explain what the issue is, and if you have fixed it, request a feed review.
You would normally have received an email before the suspension happens, giving examples to illustrate. If you can’t find the email, go to the Gear, then Email Archive.
You’ll see a list of emails Google has sent and can click the one you need to see the message:
Diagnostic Graph
One of my favorite things to check in GMC was the Diagnostic graph – that green, red, and yellow bar graph that showed approved, expiring, and disapproved items. It was the first thing you saw when you went into the GMC. It’s not gone, just hidden!
To get to it, while on the Needs Attention tab of the Products page, click the View history link.
Hooray! Here, you can change the time period and the country and filter your marketing method to Shopping Ads, Free Listings, or Dynamic Remarketing, as needed.
An Added Tip: An Easier Way to Download
If you need to download your feed and you’re having an issue downloading from the Products page or you need to see a past feed file, you can do that by going to the Gear and Data Sources. Click the name of the feed file to see the feed stats, and then select View update history.
Once on that page, you can select the data of the feed file you want to download, if not the current one, and click Download feed source file.
This page will also allow you to go back to a prior feed by selecting the feed from the dropdown and hitting Apply update.
Now, you can find the feeds, download the feeds, review the products in your feeds, and find out what the product or account issues are. You know how to request reviews on either products or feeds themselves. And you can even turn back time by reverting to a prior feed if you run into issues.
The next post in my deep dive into Google Merchant Center Next will cover Auto Improvements and Add-Ons. Stay tuned.
