6 common account & item-level GMC issues and how to fix them

To make the most of your Shopping and Performance Max campaigns, it’s important to keep your feed data up to date and to limit both account warnings and item-level disapprovals. Based on our experience with various clients, we’ve identified four key types of warnings and six common issues merchants encounter in their Google Merchant Center (GMC) accounts – and how to fix them.

Understanding the difference between account warnings and item-level issues is crucial to troubleshooting and resolving the issue. Let’s dive in:

1. Account over capacity

What it means:

Your Google Merchant Centre account has exceeded the maximum number of items allowed. This limit varies based on the type of account and its history.

Common causes:

• Submitting an excessive number of products, potentially including out-of-stock items, discontinued products, or variations that could be consolidated.
• Not regularly removing or expiring old/discontinued products from your feed.
• Incorrectly setting up product groups or variations leads to many individual items instead of fewer, more manageable entries.
• Using a standard account for a large catalogue when a higher capacity account might be more appropriate.

How to fix:

Review and optimise your product feed:

• Remove all out-of-stock, discontinued, or seasonal products that are no longer for sale.
• Consolidate product variations where appropriate (e.g., using item group IDs for different sizes/colours of the same product).
• Ensure your feed only includes products you actively want to advertise.

Request an increase in account capacity (if applicable): If you consistently have a large and active inventory, you may be able to request Google an increase in your account's item quota. You can do this via this form.

• Before requesting an increase, ensure the following:
  • You are currently using at least 90% of your existing quota.
  • There are no outstanding account warnings.
  • Your product performance is good (i.e., you don't have a high percentage of ‘zombie products’ – items with no clicks).

2. Mismatched Value

What it means:

A mismatch occurs when the value submitted in your product data for attributes like price, availability, or shipping differs from what is displayed on your website (landing page or checkout page). Google crawls your landing pages to detect and update these mismatches.

Common causes:

• Real mismatch due to delay: There's a delay in updating information between your product feed and your website.
• Real mismatch due to incorrect data: You've submitted incorrect data in your product feed.
• Incorrectly structured data: Issues with the structured data markup on your landing pages can lead to Google reading incorrect information.
• Sale price included in advance: A sale price is included in your feed before the actual sale event begins.
• Different landing pages based on IP address: Users from different IP addresses might see different prices or availability, which could lead to inconsistencies.

How to fix:

• Increase update frequency: Update your product feed more frequently to minimise discrepancies between your feed and website. You can request an hourly feed fetch from your Google support team.
• Activate automatic item updates: Enable automatic item updates in Google Merchant Center to allow Google to automatically update your product data based on information from your landing pages.
• Use sale price effective dates: If you're running a sale, use the sale_price_effective_date attribute to ensure the sale price is active only during the specified period.
• Correct structured data: Use the Rich Results Tool to check and correct any issues with your website's structured data. Ensure your website's structured data for price and sale price effectiveness date matches what's on your site.
• Short-term solution for shipping mismatch - overestimate shipping costs: If you're unsure of exact shipping costs, you can slightly overestimate them in your feed. This might make shipping look expensive to the user, but it can prevent shipping mismatch suspensions.

3. Misrepresentation Issues

What it means:

The information clients need to make decisions is not accurate.

Common causes:

• Business address is incomplete because your account is missing some contact information.
• Unclear returns policy that doesn’t clearly explain how you handle returns and refunds.

How to fix:

Check your Merchant Center’s Business Information page to see if you’ve provided the correct business address and phone number, and verify the phone number. Also, check if you provided the same physical business address (not PO Box) on your website’s footer and main web pages. In addition, you should clearly state what the user is required to do, under what circumstances you offer returns and refunds, the timeframe in which you accept returns, and when the user can expect a refund.

1. Carefully read the warning email and relevant policy. Ask for clarification if needed.
2. Make sure the issue is resolved before asking for a third review to avoid the one-week cool-down period during which the review button will be blocked.
3. Expect a re-review and reactivation of all products to take up to seven days to be completed, plus 1-3 days upon approval for the products to reactivate.

4. Promotional image overlay

What it means:

Your images aren’t in line with the expected data quality.

Common causes:

All items on Shopping ads require an image with an unobstructed view of the product, without additional promotional elements. Items that don’t meet these requirements will remain disapproved until fixed.

How to fix:

• Filter the downloaded Affected Products Report for items with ‘Issue title’ = Promotional overlay on image [image_link].
• Turn on image improvements to automatically fix images impacted by minor issues (i.e. smaller overlays, watermarks etc.).
• Search your product data for affected products (using the ID) and ensure each product is a high-quality image without overlays.

Change the URL you’ve submitted for the ‘image_link attribute’, pointing it to the correct product image.

5. Unavailable landing page issues

What it means:

Google's crawlers are unable to access or properly render your product landing pages. This prevents Google from verifying your product information, leading to disapprovals.

Common causes:

• Website accessibility issues: Your website might be down, experiencing server errors, or have incorrect robots.txt settings blocking Google's crawlers.
• Incorrect URL in product data: The link or mobile_link attribute in your product feed contains an incorrect or broken URL.
• Geo-blocking or IP-based restrictions: Your website might be blocking Google's crawlers based on their geographical location or IP address.
• Website under construction: The landing page is temporarily unavailable due to maintenance or development work.
• Excessive redirects: Too many redirects from the provided URL to the final landing page can cause issues.

How to fix:

• Check website accessibility: Ensure your website is live and accessible to the public. Test your product URLs directly in a browser and check your server logs for errors.
• Verify product URLs: Double-check the link and mobile_link attributes in your product feed to ensure they are accurate and lead to the correct product pages.
• Review robots.txt and sitemap: Make sure your robots.txt file isn't blocking Googlebot from crawling your product pages. Ensure your sitemap is up-to-date and correctly submitted in Google Search Console.
• Address geo-blocking or IP restrictions: If you have geo-blocking in place, ensure that Google's crawlers (which originate from various locations) are not inadvertently blocked.
• Minimise redirects: Reduce the number of redirects from your feed URL to the final landing page. Direct links are preferred.
• Use Google Search Console: Use the URL inspection tool in Google Search Console to see how Google views your pages and identify any crawling or indexing issues.

6. Fix item-level GTIN issues to activate your offers 

What is a GTIN?

Global Trade Item Number (GTIN) is a unique identifier assigned to each product that helps Google correctly classify the product and match the ad with more relevant customer queries.

Common causes:

The error usually occurs when one or more of the values you submit for the GTIN is invalid. This is often because the value contains characters that aren't numerals, it has an invalid checksum, or it uses formatting that doesn't match one of the standard GTIN types. If the incorrect GTIN is inserted into the product data feed file in the GMC, it will be deprioritised to a similar item with a correct GTIN.

How to fix:

• Be sure to submit correct GTINs, MPNs, and corresponding brands for all your products. This will improve the richness and relevancy of the ads shown to potential customers. You must use GTIN numbers as they have been assigned by the manufacturer, so contact them for the correct UPI (Unique Product Identifier).

Below, you can find easy implementation guidelines on how to fix your GTIN warnings:

Step 1: Locate the issue

Step 2: Select View products

Step 3: Download the file containing filtered product issues

Step 4: Go to Add-ons to enable Advanced data source management

Step 5: Select Data sources and then Supplemental sources

Step 6: Go to Supplemental sources and click Add supplemental product data. Upload Google sheets with issued GTIN items

Step 7: Go to Primary sources and click the primary feed you would like to create attribute rules