Rant: Google's MIA for Merchant Support

With the holidays in the rear-view mirror, most advertisers on Google are weary of talking about the "big change" that happened last October with product listing ads.  But, being the masochists that we are, we need to chew on it some more.  

Here's our rant...Last Spring of 2012, Google announced the upcoming "big change", i.e., pushing all Google Shopping traffic through the AdWords pay per click platform.  The announcement was met with shock and awe as advertisers slowly grappled with the fact that their formerly "free" traffic (and conversions) from the Google Shopping page (and links above organic listings on google.com) would soon be no more.

A lot of ink was spilled about Google's "justification" for yet another money grab (it will be a "better" shopping experience for consumers and better for merchants, too!).  It was going to be all lollipops and rainbows, as it frequently is with "change", you know. And Google pushed out countless blogs and "helpful" videos about how merchants could best prepare for the change.  All the while urging us to "BE READY!".

While many advertisers stuck their heads in the sand, most of us tried to "do the right thing", and tore most of our hair out in the process.  As pointed out last summer by Meg Geddes in her blog,  Google Merchant Center - One Hot Mess!, it was clear that Google didn't have all their ducks lined up, but expected us to!

By early Fall, we were "ready" and had prepared our clients as best we could, optimizing datafeeds, making sure all connections were properly made between Merchant Center and Adwords, creating auto targets and setting granular bids to optimize the highest margin products (after all, we HAD been running PLA campaigns for PPC for over a year, so no sweat, right?).  

We watched as free traffic from client datafeeds gradually turned to paid traffic, then the switch was flipped in mid-October and sayonara to organic shopping traffic (note the not so faint sounds of cash registers humming in Mountain View, CA)...gulp...white knuckle time.  Jumping ahead for a second, here's one of our client's "before and after" traffic - note the switch from the old "google-base" (free) to Product Listing Ads (paid):

Before & After of Google Shopping to Product Listing Ads - click to enlarge

All was met with, well, mixed results.  Some clients fared well.  Others, not so well, particularly those who had made concurrent changes to their websites.  Here's where it gets really ugly.

Our clients jumped through hoops to comply with PLA changes, but inevitably S*** happens.  And the ugly truth about Google Merchant Center's support (or lack thereof) was exposed.  On the brink of critical, life sustaining, holiday traffic, one client's feed "broke", i.e., was suddenly suspended by Google. This was after more than a year of smooth operation.  Note the somewhat alarming notification in their Merchant Center on November 12th:

Google Merchant Center Suspension: 11/12/12

Said client jumped on this like white on rice, re-uploading the feed, double checking all attributes, emailing Google, checking Google site verification code and reclaiming site after recent "makeover" revealed that verification code had been dropped. Waiting on Google to reply to email.

Re-uploading feed, re-checking listings, clicking the link to view "data feed quality" only to learn that "no issues with your data have been found at this time"...waiting on Google to reply to earlier emails.  Try emailing again.

Posting a question in the Merchant Center forum.  Finding out that if your feed is suspended, there is some sort of "penalty period".  Calling Google only to find out there's no live support for Merchant Center. Checking the forums again.  Emailing again.  Waiting some more.

November 13th:  decide to try to create a NEW PLA account from the stupid, annoying link within Merchant Center, even though this makes no sense at all!!!  Link to Adwords, create auto targets, set bids.  Wait.  Nothing.

November 14th:  more of the same

November 15th:  discover from the Merchant Center forum about some form to complete if your account has been suspended.  Fill out the form, submit, wait.  No reply from Google.  Crickets.

We're now a week away from one of the client's biggest sales weeks of the year!

November 16th:  start receiving communiques from others in the forum that they are also suspended without warning.  Client reaches out to Merchant Center support for assistance.  Waiting for response. Meanwhile, client removes some high margin, high search traffic products that could potentially be now viewed as not in compliance with "family friendly" policies (even though competitors with the same products ARE showing up in PLAs).

November 19th - 22nd:  Still waiting on a reply from Google.  Crickets.

November 23rd (Black Friday):  Receive reply from "googlebase-support@google.com" advising us that "account or product listing is currently not running because Google Shopping restricts the promotion of alcohol-related products."  They go on to give us a link to Google's policy on "family safe" products that clearly lists client's category of products in the "family safe" category.  So, they aren't safe, but they are???  Waaah?  Further instructions are to remove the products in "violation" (even though they aren't!!), and resubmit feed, then contact them again and ask for a review of the new feed upload.  

November 26th (Cyber Monday): new feed is uploaded and reconsideration request submitted.

November 28th:  still waiting on Google to approve feed.  Meanwhile, all competitor's PLAs are jam packed with the so called "non-family-safe" products.  Oiy.

November 29th:  with PLAs still offline, we continue to build out product specific keywords in PPC search campaigns to try to pick up the slack.

December 4th:  Account still suspended.  No feedback from Google.  Not even a phone number to call. We try to 1-866-2Google, but of course they are worthless because they don't address Merchant Center inquiries.

December 11th:  Client tries yet again to to email Google Merchant Center

Decembere 13th:  Finally a reply from googlebase-support@google.com:  

Hello,
The issue that was preventing your items from becoming active has been resolved. Please know that you may need to republish any items you wish to display in the search results again. We're looking forward to including your items soon.
Sincerely,
The Google Shopping Team

No explanation of what the "issue that was preventing your items from becoming active" was.  Could they BE any more cryptic?

December 15th:  Fresh feed is finally uploaded - less than 10 days before orders need to be placed, filled, shipped and delivered by Dec 24th, and datafeed is finally running.  We pump up the PLA adgroup bids in an attempt to achieve quick visibility.

December 16th:  impression and click volume is too light - a double check of bids only to realize that while adgroup default bids were pumped up, the actual auto-target bids were not.  Pumped up auto-target bids.  Here comes the traffic and sales - finally.

Postmortem:  all our frantic efforts to regain traffic and sales was TLTL (too little, too late).  We could never recapture the lost revenue opportunity, and the closer we got to the holiday, the more CPCs for text and PLAs skyrocketed.  

On a related note, another client migrated her entire ecommerce platform on Nov 1st.  Over 9000 skus now had new product urls.  The client's best attempts to map old urls to new urls was only partially successful, and new urls weren't as "SEO friendly", so not only did organic visibility tank, PLA traffic took a hit.  This client was able to take corrective action, but again under great durress heading into the holiday - not the best timing.

Takeaways:

• make sure all your i's are dotted and t's crossed before switching your ecomm platform or uploading a cosmetic facelift.  All major changes are apt to "break" your datafeed.  Inevitably, something is going to go wrong, and if you won't notice right away, you'll inevitably miss out on significant sales opportunities.  
• Ideally, don't make any changes in Q4, if the holiday season is significant to your bottom line.
• Make sure your datafeed is fully optimized so that product names contain important search queries because this is how Google knows to match a search to a product listing.
• Make sure your datafeed has proper adwords_grouping and adwords_labels attributes to maximize bid flexibility and return on ad spend.
• Don't be passive and wait for Google.  Keep trying to upload fresh feeds and watch your error messages very closely.  Promptly fix any products with broken image links, missing MPNs, or any other mandatory attributes. 

Last, don't expect Google to come through in a pinch with support.  They are far too busy counting their money to be bothered with Merchant Center support.  We have since submitted an AdWords support ticket complete with screen capture of the Merchant Center dashboard and related questions.  Ticket was submitted on January 18th.  Eleven days later, and we have yet to receive an acknowledgement of the ticket, yet we have physical proof that it was submitted.

It's quite outrageous, really, for Google to cause such a seismic shift in how advertisers are to conduct business and NOT give them access to prompt support.  So, we've just posted a petition on change.org and ask all to please sign our petition!

Yes, I'll sign the Change.org petition! 

Thanks for listing.  Back to the trenches.