Friday, March 07, 2014

Enforcement of Google Shopping unique product identifier requirements

Last year we announced that we began enforcing the unique product identifier requirements to improve data quality on Google Shopping. The new specifications help us serve better Google Shopping results to users while creating more opportunities for merchants. Specifically, unique product identifiers help us create one listing for a product with its various sellers, allowing users to discover a wider range of products on Shopping and easily navigate to a retailer of their choice to purchase the product.
In order to meet the unique product identifier requirements, you must provide comprehensive and accurate data. We highly recommend making the necessary changes to comply with data quality requirements as better data quality is a key lever to improve your Product Listing Ads performance.

Last year we began enforcement by (1) disapproving products that did not have data in the feed for the unique product identifier attributes - GTIN, MPN and/or brand (2) demoting products that incorrectly used the identifier_exists attribute and (3) disapproving products that provided invalid GTINs that didn’t conform to standard GTIN specifications.

Additional unique product identifier enforcement

Soon we will start to (1) disapprove products with incorrect GTIN, MPN and brand and (2) globally demote products that incorrectly use the identifier_exists attribute. We will continue to ramp up enforcements to find and disapprove products with incorrect GTIN, MPN and brand data in the coming months.

We recommend reviewing product warnings and disapprovals in the Data Quality and Data Feeds tabs in Merchant Center. For pending product disapproval launches, the violations may show up as warnings and eventually show as errors in the UI after the enforcement launch date. For products demoted due to incorrect use of ‘identifier_exists’ attribute, please review your products where it is set ‘false’ to make sure you marked so only for custom goods.

For more information, please review the unique product identifier requirements and the latest product feed specifications to make the appropriate changes to your data. You can also review our previous office hour session to help merchants with these new requirements.

Posted by Angelika Rohrer, Program Manager, Google Shopping