There are some common issues that you may encounter when setting up a Google Shopping feed.
Brand, EAN/GTIN and MPN
Google requires that two or three of these fields to be filled for each product. Fill 'brand' 100% for every product and to try to either fill EAN or MPN (you can also use SKU here). If you can't fill two out of three of the brand, GTIN or MPN field, you'll get an error when uploading the feed into Google Merchant Center. You'll need to fix this with the g:identifier_exists
field ('Fixing insufficient identifiers' in this article).
Fixing insufficient identifiers
Shopping Ads uses several identifiers. In Europe and North America these are usually: BRAND, MPN and GTIN/EAN. At least two of those need to be provided. It is not uncommon to have one or two out of the three identifiers available. In order to send products that do not have enough identifiers, the field g:identifier_exists
needs to be set to 'FALSE'.
The g:identifier_exists
field is not one that is commonly included in product feeds, so you'll usually need to create it first. Call this new field 'identifier_exists' so that you can easily identify it. Then, in the Rules step of your Google Shopping feed, create a new rule where you set 'identifier_exists' to 'FALSE'.
Be sure to map your new field to 'g:identifier_exists' and update the feed to see the results.
Shipping information
shipping.country
and shipping.price
are marked as 'Mandatory' but you can also add this information directly in your Google Merchant Center. This enables you to add multiple countries and prices for the same product. If you add this this information in the Google Merchant Center, this means that you can ignore the Quality check error and leave those fields empty. You can send multiple countries and prices for the same product through our Google Shopping API.