Google Merchant Center Testing Advice
I am running a Google ads campaign where I resell branded products. It’s been a couple of weeks now and it’s starting to show a pulse so I am slowly scaling it.
I had another Google ads account where I was running a very successful due to my items being approved on Google Merchant Center. However, after 3 months, Google flagged GMC for misinterpretation and after hiring a couple of people on Fiverr, appeals got denied. The worse part is that they also banned my Google ads account.
I am now running ads through my partners account and had to change everything even the domain and we have new products in stock as well.
I believe this happened because of a promotion we were running for a product that we were selling at a discount compared to retail price.
I want to open Merchant Center again but I cannot afford to risk accounts being suspended again. Even though some products we have are branded, I have all the information they require when setting up Google Merchant Center like address clearly shown, privacy, shipping, etc..
Is there a way I can test out if my products will get approved without risking my current account?
I was thinking to open GMC under another email that’s not linked to my Google ads account but then I risk getting the domain flagged.
Has anyone tried/done this? Any suggestions how I can test if my current products will get approved without getting banned?
The short answer is:
The safest and most technical approach to “testing” your product compliance without risking your primary Google Merchant Center (GMC) account suspension is by using the Merchant API, which is the successor to the Content API for Shopping.
The Merchant API allows for programmatic submission and management of your product data.
Specifically, you can use the products.insert method to submit your product data but initially set the channel attribute to a value that doesn’t trigger public visibility or immediate policy review for Shopping Ads, such as using it purely for a private product index.
More importantly, the API provides immediate feedback, giving you more granular detail on product-level disapprovals before they become critical account issues, which you can monitor via the productstatuses.list and accountstatuses.get methods.
This API-first approach provides a secure, granular, and cost-effective testing sandbox, ensuring your data quality is perfect before submitting to the main GMC feed, thereby mitigating the severe risk of another “misrepresentation of self or product” suspension.
The long answer is:
Your caution is extremely warranted, as a second suspension for the same policy violation, especially misrepresentation, can lead to a permanent ban of your business identity from the platform, regardless of changing domains or accounts, due to Google’s sophisticated correlation algorithms.
Opening a second, unlinked GMC account with the same domain is a direct circumvention attempt and will almost certainly result in both accounts being flagged and suspended.
The recommended solution is to leverage the Merchant API to integrate your eCommerce system – be it WooCommerce, Shopify, or a custom build- directly with a primary, low-risk Google Merchant Center account.
The key to testing safely lies in two parts: first, use the Merchant API to programmatically insert individual product updates using the products.insert service.
While full-scale, account-level policy reviews are always possible, using the API for small-batch, targeted submissions often surfaces product-level data quality issues and minor policy warnings immediately, which you can check using the productstatuses.list call to fetch detailed information on why a product is not being served.
This gives you a critical early warning before a full, scheduled feed upload escalates the issue.
Second, a highly cost-effective strategy is to integrate the Merchant API with a server-side environment like Google Cloud Platform’s Cloud Functions or a simple Stape-hosted web service.
This setup can act as a pre-validation proxy for your product data.
Before sending data to your main GMC feed, you run a check against a minimal test feed in your main account via the Merchant API, specifically looking for policy flags in the response.
If the initial API check returns a servability issue – visible in the itemLevelIssues array from a productstatuses.list call – you can refine your product data, descriptions, or landing page until the API feedback is clean, without ever submitting the problematic data to the production environment that serves your live ads.
This proactive, API-driven QA process is cost-effective because it avoids the financial loss of running disapproved ads and the catastrophic consequence of a platform-wide account suspension, turning policy compliance from a reactive disaster into a continuous, automated quality control process.
For branded products, you must pay special attention to consistently providing accurate GTIN, MPN, and brand information, as checked by the API, and ensuring your landing page content, especially the advertised discount, fully adheres to the promotional terms and accurately matches the structured data on your page, a frequent cause of the misrepresentation flag.
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