From time-to-time, websites need to come offline for maintenance. There's no way of telling Google about this, so when they perform their regular checks of your data feed against your site it sets off a wave of events, which can include product disapprovals and even suspension warnings.
In addition to temporarily pausing your ad campaigns to avoid paying for clicks to a dead site, there is also a step that needs to be taken within your product feed that is sent to the Google Merchant Center.
Adjustment to Google's Product Data Feed
Within the many fields of your Google product feed is an attribute called excluded_destination. This field alone has many options that serve many functions:
- Inserting the values "Shopping_ads" and "Free_Listings" into the
excluded_destinationfield will tell Google not to serve ads on these products. - It also removes them from Google's data quality check process, thus avoiding disapprovals and suspension warnings.
These values would only need to exist in the feed during the time the website is down. When things are back up and running, the values should be removed and the feed re-uploaded. VersaFeed can easily take care of all of this using a Feed Modification rule.
Summary
Adding 2 simple values to your feed during the planned outage can save you the headache of dealing with product disapprovals when the site is back online, and help your ads to hit the ground running. Learn more about the excluded_destination field here or contact VersaFeed for other use cases.