Introduction
There can be many reasons for drop in active products within Google Merchant Center. When you see that some of your active products have dropped in Google Merchant Center, it can be hard to figure out why. In order to understand what might have happened, we need to look at the list of reasons for drop-in and how they relate to your product data. To see what exactly is happening, you must login to your Google Merchant Center. On the left hand side, click on Products. It should take you to Diagnostics page, if you scroll down, you should see a list of exact violations. Here are some common reasons for drop-in and what they mean:
A product can drop in Merchant Center for a variety of reasons. Here are some common ones and what they mean.
A product can drop in Merchant Center for a variety of reasons. Here are some common ones and what they mean. I am listing reasons here from the most common to the less often reasons:
- Violation of Google Policies.
- Unavailable Landing Page.
- Invalid Value (GTIN).
- Mismatched Value (page crawl) [price].
- Mismatched Availability.
If you see any of the above reasons in your diagnostics page, you should read ahead, you may find solutions for some of your issues and hopefully will be able address them after reading this article.
Violation of Google Policies
- Violation of Google policies
This reason is the most common I have seen so far, some of you maybe selling products that should not be sold on Google Shopping. There are a number of ways to violate Google’s policies. This can occur for a variety of reasons, including:
- Products you are submitting are not allowed to show within Google Shopping or other Google programs. For example: masks are not allowed to be advertised after COVID-19. Another product that very often gets flagged is “gift cards.”
- Duplicate products with different SKUs (stock-keeping units) in your account that are not related to each other
- Inactive or misleading product data
- Missing or incorrect images
If you are selling some products that are not allowed to be listed on Google, the best way to solve the problem is to exclude those products from the programs that do not allow them. This might solve your drop in active products issue, but if not, read on.
Unavailable mobile/desktop landing page
A lot of times this happens when your hosting account or your store goes down. So the best way to solve it is to see if your website is up and running. If it is, then you should check which products are being flagged and follow the link to your product page. Verify whether the product page is active. If it is active and working, just wait for 24 hours and Google will remove the violation. Sometimes, you may have removed that product from your store yet your data feed still contains information about that product, in that case you will need to update your feed.
Also, If there’s no mobile version of the page, then again: no love from Google! Same goes for desktop version of the page, you must ensure that your store is accessible from every device including desktop computers, mobile phones, and tablets.
GTIN Invalid value
First thing is first, GTIN is also know as UPC or Barcode. If you notice a drop in active products, this could be due to a GTIN Invalid value. A GTIN is the Global Trade Item Number and is used to uniquely identify products. GTINs are required for product feeds, so that Google can verify product information and match it up with other products they’ve seen on the web. If your e-commerce store has several different brands, each brand’s item numbers should have its own unique GTIN.
If you see some of your products with a “GTIN Invalid”, that means Google can’t verify information as being accurate. This could mean one of two things: either there’s an issue with how you’re entering UPC codes into your feed – or – it may indicate an issue where Google Merchant Center cannot find any matching UPCs for those items anywhere else online either currently or historically (which would make sense if this impacted only certain items).
To solve the issue, you must find the correct UPC for your products and update your product information in order to get the violation removed. Let’s say that you can not find that particular information for certain products and still want to show your products in Google Shopping or Free listing. One of the solutions that I have found is that clearing GTIN for that product and providing MPN. MPN can be anything you want, it doesn’t have to be from the manufacturer.
Mismatched value (page crawl) [price]
If you’ve entered a price in the Google Merchant Center and your site’s product page does not match it, then this won’t be counted as an active product. This can happen if your store has been updated to reflect a change in pricing but not yet updated on Google Merchant Center. In other cases, you maybe selling products in bulk and you want to show the price per 1 product. There are ways to tell Google that there is “minimum order requirement,” and you can use “unit base pricing” and other attributes to fix the issue.
Another issue that I have seen is that your products have multiple variations, yet your product page doesn’t lead to that specific variation. For example, if you sell Small, Medium, and Large and they differ in price, your product that is listed as Medium, will need to have it’s own variation link. One fix to this issue is to list the lowest price that customers can see on your product page. That would be a bit misleading to your customers, but you maybe able to get the problem resolved temporarily while you work on your product page issue.
If this is the case, you should update everything ASAP! You can also use feed rules to update product attributes.
Mismatched Availability
If your stock status updates regularly, you may sell out of a product before the feed updates Google Merchant Center. In this case the mismatched availability violation may pop up until you update the feed. Another reason for violation is that you may have set your shipping settings to ship locally or within certain region. Yet you have set your shipping settings within Google Merchant Center to nationwide. You have to update your shipping settings within Google to reflect that of your store to solve drop in active products.
Conclusion
If you’re seeing a decrease in active products , follow our guide and you it should help you solve the issue. Also, look for missing information or typos in your metadata. Make sure all of your product details (including price) are accurate and consistent across Google Shopping.
aziz.rozigov