Google has announced this years updates to Product Feed Specifications!
We see these every year as Google continues to seek to improve the Shopping experience for both consumers and retailers alike.
This years updates follow a bit of a theme in that certain requirements and how products may be disapproved are being relaxed.
Here’s the rundown:
Long titles and descriptions truncation: Titles and/or descriptions that exceed the set character limit for each will no longer be flagged as disapproved. Instead, Google will automatically truncate these attributes to the set length and a warning will be indicated in Merchant Center.
Condition: No longer required for new products! If you submit the wrong/invalid or an unrecognized value for condition, Google will assume that it is new. However, if Google finds products that are used or refurbished upon crawling your site AND you submitted those products as new or without a condition, they will be disapproved.
Cost of Goods Sold (COGS): Optional, and something we here at Sales & Orders have been doing since the very beginning, Google will now accept Cost of Goods Sold (cost_of_goods_sold) to help retailers more accurately track their gross profit from Shopping ads. We’re excited to see this incorporated into the New AdWords Experience.
It’s important to note that Google Analytics should still be the preferred method of tracking conversions and sales to then align that data for profit tracking.
Size, color, and link attributes: If you were to submit more than one value for any of these attributes it will trigger a warning. For multicolored products you can still utilize hyphens and/or slashes to separate the different colors (you CANNOT use commas). For size you can continue to use range value to separate the different sizes.
AdWords redirect (Enforcing begins February 1, 2019): Redirect links for AdWords tracking must be the directing to the same domain for both link and mobile_link.
(Read the official word from Google here)
These updates went into effect June 25th, 2018
As a result, products that were once disapproved may now be approved and eligible. Conversely, products that were once approved may become disapproved.
It is crucial that you take a look into your current feeds stats to see if this update had any effect on your feed.