Google Shopping no Impressions...Error on merchants?

[WeeSAW]

Hi,

I set up my google shopping a few weeks ago and all of the products have been approved. Today I created my first Shopping campaign and I noticed it hasn't gotten a single Impression. I went to google merchants to see what's going on and I noticed there is an issue in the "diagnostics" tab. The error says "Invalid destination [excluded destination]" Is that why there could be a problem with getting impressions? 

What can I do to solve this? When I started a Google Ads campaign within Google Ads last week, I saw I was getting impressions right away. 

Thanks, Emmet

[JonWright]

Hi - afraid this doesn't solve your problem but might help. When I saw your post I logged in to my Merchant Centre account to see if I could work out what the error message "Invalid destination [excluded destination]" was all about. To my surprise, I saw that I too am getting exactly the same error on 45% of my products, which was definitely not the case last time I looked a few weeks ago. When I look further it says Affected destinations: Dynamic Remarketing, Shopping ads (so that I think answers what is meant by 'destination').

I also noticed that I had an automated email from Merchant Centre on 16th Jan saying:

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Between 15 January 2020 18:15:00 GMT and 16 January 2020 00:15:00 GMT, we detected a drop in the number of active items in your Merchant Center account (Account ID: xxxxxxx).

The items are either expiring within the next three days, or are not available to show on Google.

• Destination – Country – Drop in active items

• Dynamic Remarketing – GB – 45% (from 1,186 to 650) – view
• Shopping ads – GB – 45% (from 1,307 to 708) – view

Note: Only drops of 20% or more are reported here.

If this drop was unintentional, please go to your Merchant Center Diagnostic Page to view more details.

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Note that none of my products have an expiry date/are set to expire.

When I then check those products in my Google Ads account, they actually look fine and are showing as 'ready to serve' and they are getting impressions (so in my case it doesn't seem to be causing an issue, which is even weirder).

Anyway, I have emailed support at Google Merchant Centre to find out what is going on. I'll update this post when I get anywhere.

[WeeSAW]

Thank you. I will eagerly wait for an update. 

[JonWright]

No problem.

BTW I don't know how experienced you are with Google Shopping, but I use it a lot. Top tip is don't use Smart Shopping (only thing it's smart at, in my experience, is making Google more money), use the negative keyword strategy by Martin Roettgerding,  explained on this guys blog https://www.ppc-epiphany.com/2014/12/08/taking-google-shopping-to-the-next-level/. Works well.

[EmmanuelFlossie]

You should report this issue to the app developer so they can fix the destination attribute.

Alternatively use a management tool or app that does not have this issue or has the ability to change the data feed info.

As mentioned, I'm guessing you are using smart shopping. This does not work well, for my clients I only using on a couple where there are enough sales and the client does not want to grow and is happy with the results.

If your intentions are to grow your business go with standard campaigns, and improve your setup on a weekly basis.

Campaign 1: Priority High, add branded and relevant search terms as a negative keyword. And set the bids to low
Campaign 2: Priority Medium, add branded search terms as negative. Now all relevant search terms will end up here. Set the bids to medium
Campaign 3: Priority Low, here all branded search terms will end up in. Set the bids to high.