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Disapproved products in Google Merchant Center are a quality signal – a bad one. The more items get disapproved, the more likely Google is to favour your competitors. Trivial issues such as the language/shipping configuration often hide real problems like wrong prices or 404 product pages. That's why reducing the disapproval rate to below 1 % is one of the first things we do in new accounts.
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One of the first things we do when we take over a new Google Ads account: we reduce the number of disapproved products in Merchant Center to below 1 %.
The reason is simple. We want to signal to Google that we play by the rules and only submit products that meet the minimum requirements.
🚫 A large part of the inventory doesn't meet the quality criteria? If it already fails at this point, what about all the other criteria? Just imagine walking into a supermarket where 50 % of the items are spoiled or damaged.
🚫 Google favours your competitors. After all, it's much more likely that they deliver better quality. I'd rather shop at a supermarket where the product quality is right, too.
🚫 Often it isn't just one problem that causes items to be disapproved. A trivial issue in the language/shipping configuration can easily mask real errors such as wrong prices, poor translations or 404 product pages – and those can lead to entire countries being blocked.
➡ It really isn't hard to get the number of disapproved products below 3 %. In my view, the only legitimate excuse would be technical problems on the website. That makes a quick fix all the more important, because all other marketing channels are affected by these errors too.
Why not reduce the disapproval rate to 0 %? Simple: Google keeps inventing a few errors that don't actually exist. That's why it's often impossible to eliminate every single one. At least I don't know of any account where that's the case.
Clean feed data is the foundation of every successful Shopping and Performance Max campaign. Consistently keeping disapproved products to a minimum shows Google that you play by the rules – and often uncovers errors that affect your other marketing channels as well. If the cause lies in technical problems on the website, it should be fixed quickly.
