You have 2,000 products in your store. You run Shopping on Google and catalog ads on Meta. On a Monday morning you open Merchant Center and see a few hundred products disapproved. Sales from Google have been down since Friday, and nobody told you anything.
This is more common than you think, and the cause is almost always the same: catalog ads are built from your feed. Google Shopping, Performance Max, Meta Advantage+ Catalog, TikTok Shopping: they all read the feed. A product that is not in the feed does not appear in the ad. A product that is in the feed with a bad title, a wrong picture or a wrong price appears badly or is disapproved. Many "the ad is not working" problems are really data problems.
What a product feed is, in short
A file or a connection that describes each product through a set of fields: ID, title, description, link, image, price, availability, brand, category. The platforms read it periodically and update their catalog. Each has its own specification, but the base is the same, so a clean feed adapts easily for all three.
Nine mistakes we see often and how to fix them
1. The GTIN, brand or MPN is missing
For most branded products, Google asks for the GTIN, that is, the barcode (in Europe, the EAN). Without it, the product can be limited or shown less often. Do you sell your own products, without a barcode? You mark that they have no identifier. You do not make up a code.
How to fix it: export the barcodes from your store platform, fill in the brand for all products, and check that products without a code have the field that says the identifier does not exist.
2. The price or stock in the feed does not match the page
It is the classic reason for disapproval in Merchant Center. Google visits the product page and compares the price and stock with what the feed says. Did you put a discount on at noon, and the feed updates once a day? You have a mismatch, and the product fails.
How to fix it: update the feed as often as you can, at least daily, more often if you change prices during the day. Check the price format (a value with two decimals, followed by the currency code) and that VAT is treated the same in the feed and on the page. It matters most on Black Friday, when prices change several times a day.
3. Titles written for the warehouse
In the admin, the product is called "Shoe 4521 black". The customer searches for "black men's sneakers". The title in the feed must contain what people search for, in order of importance: brand, product type, model, color, size or material.
How to fix it: set a title rule (for example {brand} {product type} {model} {color}) and apply it to the whole catalog, not product by product. Remove "Offer!" or "Free shipping" from titles, which Google may disapprove.
4. Pictures that break the rules
On the main image, Google does not accept an overlaid logo, promotional text, banners or a watermark. Small, blurry pictures or ones with a busy background display poorly. Meta and TikTok are more lenient, but there too a clean picture, with the product in the center, does well.
How to fix it: on image_link keep the clean picture, on a plain background. Versions with context or with text go in the additional images field or in separately made ads.
5. Variants are not grouped
A T-shirt in 3 colors and 5 sizes means 15 variants of the same product. Without item_group_id, each one appears as a separate product, the catalog fills up with duplicates, and the platforms cannot show the variant selector.
How to fix it: give the same item_group_id to all the variants of a product and each variant its own id, which does not change. For clothes you fill in color, size, gender and age group.
6. The Google category is missing or too vague
The google_product_category field tells Google what you sell. If it is missing or says "Apparel & Accessories" for everything, display is less precise.
How to fix it: you map your categories once to the most specific category in the Google taxonomy. Then the rule applies itself to new products.
7. The ID in the feed is not the same as the one in the pixel
On Meta and TikTok, dynamic ads link the product in the catalog to what the visitor does on the site: they saw product X, you show product X. The link is made through the ID. If the pixel sends content_id = 4521, and the feed has id = SKU-4521, the platform does not match them, and dynamic remarketing does not work.
How to fix it: pick a single ID for the product (usually the SKU or the platform ID) and use it identically in the feed, in the pixel and in the events sent from the server.
8. Out-of-stock products that stay in ads
A sold-out product that still appears in ads costs you clicks that cannot become orders.
How to fix it: send the real stock (in_stock, out_of_stock) and remove from ads the products that are out of stock or have too low a margin through filtering rules, not by hand.
9. The same feed for all platforms
The specifications are similar, but not identical. Google has length limits and mandatory fields by category, Meta accepts extra fields for dynamic ads, TikTok asks for its own image and video formats. A feed sent unchanged to three places gets warnings in at least one.
How to fix it: one source of data, one feed for each destination, each with its own rules.
The Monday morning check
Do not wait for sales to drop to find out that something broke. Once a week, look at:
- Google Merchant Center: the product issues and how many products are approved out of those you sent;
- Meta Commerce Manager: the catalog warnings and the products without an image or price;
- TikTok: the catalog status and the reasons for disapproval;
- how many products you have in the feed against how many active products you have in the store. If the gap is large, something broke along the way.
It takes a quarter of an hour and saves you the surprise from the start of this article.
How Aopy handles feeds
Aopy is built by the team behind Clinica de Marketing, which has worked in e-commerce since 2016.
Aopy's Feed Manager takes the products from the connected store and generates feeds for Google (through Merchant API), Meta and TikTok, plus custom feeds for other destinations. You control titles, categories and filters through rules that apply to the whole catalog, not product by product. You can build product sets, for example only those that are in stock and have a good margin, and use them as the basis for ads.
Aopy also checks the health of the feed: it shows you the products with problems, such as a missing picture, price or identifiers. It does not guarantee approval, because the final decision always belongs to Google, Meta or TikTok. But it shows you what to correct and where.
The packages are on the pricing page.