Google Shopping Bug Leads To Huge Impression Declines
Google Ads seemed to have a bug last week with Google Shopping in some regions, like the UK, but I think others, where the shopping listings were not showing up. Some advertisers were claiming drops in their listings from showing up by over 90%, yes, 90% impression drops for Google Shopping campaigns.
This issue seems to have stated this past Friday, August 20th and still seems to be lingering on days later.
There are a whole set of threads in the Google Ads Help Forums – a dozen or so, but I linked to only two.
Here is one complaint, “My Smart Shopping has recently experienced a major drop in impressions and spend. Nothing in the campaign has been changed and the product feed looks fine. See attached graph for August. The drop is from Friday 20th and continued like that over the weekend.”
Google product expert Emmanuel Flossie made a thread to keep us posted on the status over here and wrote “I will update this post when a CM has confirmed when this issue is resolved. On Friday the 20th, Shopping performance for a lot of UK merchants has dropped a lot. Please report this to Google Ads support immediately, in your Google Ads account > top right corner > question mark > get help > contact us.”
Here are some tweets I found with the issue:
Here’s another that saw the “5pm jump”
Still down approx -40% comparing to previous Monday though… pic.twitter.com/STyfg0SWEL
— Liam Wade 🎸 (@Digital_Liam) August 23, 2021
Same here. Dropped by 80% yesterday. Branded terms seem to be back to normal today but anything else is still low. Crazy.
— Chris (@CHLEGR) August 21, 2021
Also, bugs like this with #GoogleShopping make me less confident in switching everything to machine learning. I need more reassurance. Bugs will happen, but this has been several days now… #PPCChat
— Rachel (she/her) (@PPCRachel) August 23, 2021
There are a lot more complaints that I did not share but maybe you should check out your Google Ads shopping campaigns to make sure all is in order.
Forum discussion at Google Ads Help Forums.
