WooCommerce & GMC
I’ve got a WooCommerce shop I’m setting up Google Shopping ads for. The GMC was set up as a sub account but I’ve just found that the Google Listings & Ads plugin won’t connect to it because it’s on an advanced account. Any recommendations for a plugin that will work with it?
ALSO, some of the products are only allowed to be sold in a specific region, so what is the best way of separating those out to allow two different shopping campaigns?
The short answer is:
The connection issue with your Multi-Client Account (MCA) structure in Google Merchant Center (GMC) is common when using basic plugins like Google Listings & Ads, as they often rely on simplified account linking that is incompatible with advanced, sub-account setups.
The robust, definitive solution for both the connection and your regional product separation challenge is to leverage a dedicated third-party WooCommerce feed management plugin that uses the Merchant API (formerly Content API for Shopping) for product data synchronization.
This API-based approach bypasses plugin limitations and provides granular control.
To manage your region-specific products, you must use the Merchant API to populate the product-level attribute for shipping with the correct country and region details or utilize the shopping_ads_excluded_country attribute to ensure products only appear in the approved regions, which allows for separate regional Shopping campaigns in Google Ads.
This is significantly more cost-effective than custom development, providing an off-the-shelf solution with API power.
The long answer is:
The Google Listings & Ads plugin, while useful for simple standalone GMC accounts, is fundamentally limited when interacting with an MCA structure, which is designed for managing multiple sub-accounts for various brands or regions, as its internal logic does not always accommodate the complex linking required for a sub-account feed submission.
The technical requirement for reliable, scalable integration in your advanced environment points directly to using the Google Merchant API, which is the official method for programmatic management of product data, inventory, and accounts in Google Merchant Center.
To implement this, you should select a premium WooCommerce product feed plugin that explicitly uses the Merchant API rather than simply generating a static feed file.
Such a plugin acts as a crucial bridge, automatically translating your WooCommerce product database into the required JSON or XML format and pushing it directly to your GMC sub-account via the API endpoints, ensuring real-time or near-real-time synchronization of critical data points like price and inventory, a significant cost-saving over manual feed uploads or custom coding.
For the regional product separation, the Merchant API is essential because it allows for granular control over product attributes.
You would use the feed management plugin to create custom logic that checks a WooCommerce product tag or custom field (where you define the allowed region) and then, when submitting the product data via the Merchant API, it will populate the shipping attribute for that product with the specific region’s shipping information, or, more simply for exclusion, it can populate the shopping_ads_excluded_country attribute with the country codes where the product cannot be sold.
Submitting this exclusion data directly via the Merchant API guarantees that the product is eligible for Shopping campaigns only in the intended regions, which is the foundational step required before creating your distinct regional campaigns in Google Ads, providing a precise and highly cost-effective solution for regulatory compliance and campaign segmentation.
Furthermore, as an expert recommendation, integrating the BigQuery API to export your product and performance data from Google Analytics 4 (GA4) or Google Ads could later allow you to join the regional sales data with your product data for advanced profitability analysis in Looker Studio, extending the value of your initial API-centric setup.
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