Why are my Google Shopping ads not showing? A checklist

Check this first: where the block usually is

If your Google Shopping ads are not showing, the cause is almost always in Merchant Center, not in Google Ads. Products get disapproved, the feed goes stale, or the whole account gets suspended, and the campaign sits there spending nothing while looking perfectly healthy in the Google Ads interface.

So check upstream first. Google Ads will happily report a campaign as eligible while every product inside it is blocked somewhere else.

Here is the full checklist, in the order that finds the problem fastest:

1. 1Merchant Center account status. A suspension stops everything, however the campaign is set up.
2. 2Item-level disapprovals. Some products blocked and some serving, so the campaign looks half alive.
3. 3Missing required attributes. No price, no availability, no image, no identifier: no listing.
4. 4Website policy problems. Contact details, returns policy and checkout are the three that get accounts suspended.
5. 5Feed fetch failures or stale data. Google treats product data that has not refreshed in 30 days as expired.
6. 6Merchant Center not linked to Google Ads, or linked to a different account than the one running the campaign.
7. 7Budget or bid too low to enter the auction with any regularity.
8. 8Targeting, ad schedule or listing group ruling your products out.
9. 9Products out of stock. Sold-through lines stop serving by design, and no campaign change brings them back.
10. 10Performance Max taking the impressions from your standard Shopping campaign.

Work down that list, not up. Most people start at the bottom because bids and budgets are the controls they know, then spend an afternoon adjusting things that were never the problem.

Merchant Center: suspensions and item disapprovals

Open Merchant Center and read the diagnostics before you touch anything else. It tells you in plain language how many products are active, how many are disapproved, and which rule each one broke.

Account-level suspension

A suspended account means nothing serves. The usual triggers are misrepresentation (your site does not make it clear who you are, what you charge, or how returns work), a price or availability mismatch between the feed and the landing page, and breaches in restricted categories.

Google emails the registered address before most suspensions take effect, so check that inbox and the spam folder. The warning usually names the exact policy, which saves you guessing.

Item-level disapprovals

• Image problems. Promotional overlays, watermarks, logos and placeholder images all get rejected, as does an image URL Google cannot crawl.
• Price mismatch. The feed price must match the landing page price, GST included. Australian shoppers compare a GST-inclusive figure, and a gap of a few cents is enough to trip it.
• Missing or invalid identifiers. GTIN, brand and MPN requirements vary by category, and the product data specification is the authority on which ones yours needs.
• Restricted content. Alcohol, supplements, therapeutic goods and weapons carry extra rules in Australia and are frequently blocked by default.
• Landing page errors. A 404, a redirect to a category page, or a page that blocks the crawler will disapprove the item no matter how good the feed is.

Fix the items, then request a review where Merchant Center offers one. Reviews are not instant, so give it a few days before deciding the fix did not work.

Website problems that stop the whole account

The rules that catch most Australian stores have nothing to do with advertising. They are about whether your website looks like a real business that a stranger can safely buy from.

Google’s Shopping ads policies expect all of the following, visible without hunting:

• Contact details. A business name plus an email or contact form at minimum, and a phone number and address if you have them. A bare form is thin.
• A returns and refunds policy. Written down, easy to find, and consistent with Australian Consumer Law. "No refunds" is not a policy you can advertise behind.
• A checkout that works and is secure. HTTPS site-wide, a checkout that completes, and no surprise fees appearing at the last step.
• Clear pricing in AUD, GST inclusive, with shipping costs shown before the final screen.
• Terms and a privacy policy. Two pages, mostly boilerplate, routinely missing.

Worth saying out loud: none of that costs money to fix. If you have been suspended for misrepresentation, do not hire anyone to go and optimize your feed. The fix is on your website, it is a morning of writing, and paying an agency to do the checklist above is spending money on a problem you can solve before lunch.

Feed not fetching, stale data and missing attributes

A feed that quietly stops updating will kill a campaign without any warning in Google Ads. Google treats product data as expired 30 days after its last refresh, and expired products stop serving even though nothing in the account changed.

• Check the last successful fetch. If the scheduled fetch is failing, the file has usually moved, the credentials have changed, or your store is blocking the crawler.
• Check the frequency. Daily is the floor for most stores, and price or stock changes should push through faster than that.
• Check your feed rules. Supplemental feeds and rules are useful and occasionally over-enthusiastic, and a rule written for one category can overwrite good data everywhere else.
• Check the required attributes are actually populated. id, title, description, link, image_link, availability, price and brand are the ones that stop a listing dead when they are empty.

Attributes decide matching quality as well as eligibility. If your products are approved and serving but barely getting impressions, that is a different problem with a different fix, and how to optimize Google Shopping ads covers it properly.

Campaign settings: linking, budget, bids and targeting

Once Merchant Center is clean, the remaining causes sit in Google Ads. These are quicker to check and usually quicker to fix.

• Merchant Center is not linked, or it is linked to a different Google Ads account than the one running the campaign. The link has to be approved at both ends.
• The campaign or ad group is paused. Obvious, and it still happens, usually after someone paused things for a stocktake and moved on.
• Budget is too low to compete. A few dollars a day in a contested category buys almost no impression share, which reads as "not showing" from where you are sitting.
• Target ROAS is set too aggressively. Ask for 900% and the system bids so low you rarely enter the auction. The campaign is doing what you told it to do, it just cannot find enough cheap clicks to hit the target.
• Location targeting excludes your customers, or sits on a suburb radius tight enough that mobile location signals keep missing it.
• Ad schedule is restricting you. A campaign limited to business hours is invisible at 9pm, which is when a lot of shopping happens.
• The listing group or inventory filter excludes the products. Standard Shopping only serves what the listing group includes, and a leftover filter from a seasonal push can quietly exclude most of the catalog.

If you are not sure whether the settings or the mechanics are at fault, how Google Shopping ads work walks through what has to line up before an ad can serve at all.

The best account structure is the one a human can understand six months later. Most "our ads stopped showing" emergencies turn out to be a setting someone changed for a good reason that nobody wrote down.

Performance Max, stock levels and when to stop

Two causes left. Both look like a fault when they are really the system doing its job.

The products are out of stock

Out of stock products do not serve, by design. If your best sellers sold through and the feed is accurate, the ads are not broken, the stock ran out. That is a supply problem, and no amount of campaign work fixes it. Get the stock in, or exclude those lines so the budget goes to products you can actually ship this week.

Performance Max is outranking your Shopping campaign

If you run Performance Max and a standard Shopping campaign covering the same products, Performance Max takes priority. The standard campaign loses its impressions and looks like it has stopped working, when it has really just been outranked inside your own account.

Do not fix that by raising the Shopping bid. Pick one campaign type per product set, or split the catalog so the two are not bidding against each other. If you are still weighing up whether to run it at all, is Performance Max worth it gives the honest version.

And the check nobody enjoys. If you have worked through this whole list and everything is approved, funded and serving, but impressions are still thin, the answer is usually price. Shopping is a comparison surface. Being the tenth cheapest listing on the page is not a bidding problem, and bidding harder to sit next to a cheaper competitor is an expensive way to advertise their store.

That is the whole diagnostic, in the order we run it on e-commerce Google Ads accounts. Merchant Center first, feed second, campaign third. It is not exciting, and it finds the problem faster than guessing does.

Frequently asked questions