I’ve been running and playing with google’s adwords product listings for a while now and forever and a day I’ve been working on the google merchant shopping feed (froogle/base).
Back in 2006 I got invited into to google to work with them on google base as I was emailing google base support at least 5 times a week http://www.seohome.co.uk/2006/12/18/went-to-google-today/
Anyway I’ve not had much to moan about base/shopping/merchant centre for a long time until now..
As most of us know google to switching to a “paid” version of google merchant in the fall (autumn) see here for more details about that: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-shopping-paid-15233.html
So a new client I’m working with in the UK has been advised by me to start testing the product ads which I have had great success with for my long term clients.
So.. I logged into merchant centre to check out what products are approved for ads and saw the below warning:
wow what great news.. Google has added a short cut way to enable the product listing on adwords..
Yes the warning mentions feeds targeting the US but I’ve run product ads in the UK for a long time now I thought I’d use this simple short cut to enable a complete listing and learn a new process and offering from google to make it simple!
The process was so simple and showed up as enabled in the merchant centre. I went over to adwords and saw it had created everything for me.. Wow.. 2 clicks and it’s all done..
So I left it to run for a few days before checking out the impressions and results..
Here is the screen shot from the results within the merchant centre:
As you can see NO impressions and no clicks. I raised the cpc bid to see if it was to low.. Nothing.. no imp and clicks..
So google’s merchant centre said all good, all ok… so time to checkout what’s going on with adwords.
I did my normal tick list of billing ok? enabled? eligible? all fine..
Time to drill down into the campaign itself..
Here is the screen shot of the problem:
Google sets up a USA version only.. As this client is only in the UK and only has a UK feed the ads will not show.
Simple to fix of course but interesting that google isn’t checking if you have a US feed and just enabling a void campaign.
