This a great time to do a final sweep of your Google Merchant Center accounts, now that the holidays are upon us, to ensure that your product identifiers are in order. This is important given some of the recent changes.
In an announcement made by Google earlier this year, it would be updating enforcement around unique product identifiers (UPI) for Shopping ads in 23 countries, which began September 30.
A UPI is a unique identifier that is associated with a product. Common UPIs are Global Trade Item Numbers (GTINs), Manufacturer Part Numbers (MPNs), and brand names.
It’s time to cover the UPI enforcement changes. In the past, Google Merchant Center would disapprove products that didn’t require UPIs in the feeds, automatically. But now, products that are missing UPIs will be eligible for Shopping ads, but with a catch. Products that don’t have the correct UPIs assigned in the feed will receive lower priority that products from sellers with correct UPIs in their feed. Having any missing UPIs will put your products in a tier below your competitors that provided the UPIs for those products.
If you aren’t able to find a product’s UPI, don’t try getting around it by setting the identifier_exists attribute in your feed to “false.” If Google understand that the product does have a UPI, it’ll disapprove the product, so make sure you set the attribute to “true.” Leave the UPI fields blank until you can get the information from the manufacturer.
GTINs are unique identifiers, so if you are using the same GTIN for multiple products, the will be disapproved.
The countries that the enforcement rules for UPIs for Shopping ads will apply to Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Czechia, India, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom, and the United States.