Troubleshooting: Merchant Center Account issues

If all Shopping campaigns in your Google Ads account are not serving, check your Merchant Center account to confirm whether it is suspended or if the accounts are linked correctly. If the account is suspended, a banner will appear notifying you of the account status. You need to resolve any of these account issues before the shopping campaign can serve.

On this page

What you can do

 

Products are not eligible to serve

The fastest way to verify if products in a Shopping campaign are eligible to serve is to check the Products tab.

What you can do

  • Go to the campaign in question.
  • Click on the Products tab on the left and then Diagnostics.
  • Verify if products have a status of  "Ready to serve".
 

Outdated listing groups

When setting up which products to run from your Performance Max campaign in listing groups, you could target all products or can select specific products by filtering for item ID, brand, custom label, etc. If attributes change in the Merchant Center feed, the listing group isn't automatically updated in Google Ads.

Example

If the product group was targeting only certain products using item ID and now the Merchant Center feed doesn't include any of these products.

What you can do

  • Check that listing groups are up to date and in line with the product attributes in Merchant Center.
 

Expired data feed

Merchant Center data feeds need to be uploaded every 30 days, after which time they expire. If a feed is expired, any Shopping campaigns that use this feed will not be able to serve.

What you can do

Check if your feed is expired in your Merchant Center account:

  • Go to the Products tab, then click Feeds.
  • Click into the feed and check the last upload date.
  • If it’s been more than 30 days since the last feed upload, the feed is now expired and a new feed will need to be uploaded.
 

Expired items via the “expiration date” attribute

If products have been uploaded into the Merchant Center feed along with the expiration_date attribute, these products stop serving after the date included.

What you can do

  • Check the products in the feed to confirm if their expiration date has not passed.

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