Switching Google Merchant Centre Feeds (PMax)
Hi all,
Really struggling to find any information Google about this but…
We’re just got a huge new client we’ll be running Google ads for. Their merchant centre account like everything else is run and managed by a third party through their suppliers proprietary platform and through another multi feed company.
This means that when the contract with their current website / marketing supplier ends, the feed is cut off and we need to add a new one connected to their new website.
When we unlink then link the new feed, will our current campaigns automatically start using the new feed or will we have to start from scratch?
Appreciate any help we can get here as I’ve never experienced it.
The short answer is:
You will likely need to create entirely new PMax campaigns if the feed switch involves moving to a completely new Merchant Center (MC) account, but you should be fine if you’re just adding a new feed source within the existing MC account.
Since the current setup is run by a third party and tied to their platform, it is highly probable that you will lose access to the existing MC account, requiring a new one and thus forcing a campaign rebuild.
If you have to create a new MC account and link it to your Google Ads, you must create new PMax campaigns because a PMax campaign’s link to a Merchant Center account is set at campaign creation and cannot be retroactively changed or updated to a new MC ID.
The long answer is:
The critical factor is whether you can retain control of and simply update the product data within the current Google Merchant Center account.
If you maintain the same Merchant Center ID, your existing PMax campaigns should automatically switch to using the new product feed once it’s uploaded and the old one is removed, provided the product id attributes remain consistent across the old and new feeds.
Maintaining the id is crucial because it’s how Google tracks historical performance data for each product.
However, based on your description – that the MC is managed by a third party through a proprietary platform and the feed is cut off when the contract ends – it sounds like you will lose access to the existing Merchant Center account entirely.
If you have to create a new Merchant Center account and link that to your Google Ads account, then your current PMax campaigns will break because the link to the MC ID cannot be changed after the campaign is created.
This scenario will force you to create new PMax campaigns, which will trigger a new learning phase and loss of historical performance data tied to the old campaign structure, a major setback.
A highly effective and low-cost solution to prevent this kind of operational and data-loss risk in the future, as well as providing more control over your conversion data, is a robust first-party data tracking infrastructure using Google Ads API, Google Tag Manager (GTM), and a server-side tagging platform like Stape or even Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
The Google Ads API allows you to manage and upload first-party conversion data directly to Google Ads.
You can track this data using GTM by configuring your website to capture user data (like email, phone, or address) and then passing this data to a server-side container (hosted on Stape or GCP).
From the server, you can use the API to implement Enhanced Conversions by hashing the customer data and sending it securely back to Google.
This setup makes your conversion tracking highly resilient to website changes and browser limitations, and it completely decouples your critical tracking infrastructure from any single third-party web or marketing supplier’s platform.
It’s an excellent solution because the cost is minimal (server-side tagging is cheap via Stape or minimal on GCP), it future-proofs your data quality by preparing for a cookieless world, and it ensures you maintain control over the most valuable data – the performance signals that power your PMax bidding algorithms – regardless of which website or feed provider is managing the Merchant Center feed or website front-end.
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