Google Merchant Center Checklist: How to Protect Visibility, Performance, and Sales

Google Merchant Center serves as the vital link between your e-commerce store and your potential customers, acting as the foundation for high visibility and peak sales performance. At the heart of this ecosystem is your product feed, the primary driver that ensures your data is accurate, competitive, and ready to convert across Google’s shopping surfaces. 

To help you maintain a healthy account and maximise your reach, here are seven essential best practices: 

 1. Enable product protection to safeguard performance history

Product protection prevents large, accidental feed changes from instantly removing products. If many items suddenly disappear, Merchant Center pauses the update until you approve it, helping preserve item-level performance history that would otherwise be lost if products are removed and reintroduced. 

2. Regularly monitor the “Needs Attention” tab

The Needs Attention tab highlights products and account issues that could limit visibility or cause disapprovals. Reviewing this regularly allows you to catch problems early, prevent sudden drops in active products, and keep your account compliant with Google policies. 

3. Keep your primary product feed updated daily

A daily feed refresh ensures that key information like price, availability, and stock status stays aligned with your website. This reduces the risk of mismatches that can lead to disapproved products, wasted ad spend, or poor user experience when shoppers click through to outdated listings.

4. Avoid relying on manual product edits

While manual edits can be useful for quick fixes, they override feed data and often cause long-term inconsistencies. They also can’t be reverted in bulk, making them hard to manage at scale. Wherever possible, fix issues at the feed level to keep your data clean and maintain full control. 

5. Use Automatic Item Updates carefully

Automatic Item Updates help Google resolve price and availability mismatches between your feed and website. When implemented correctly, they can reduce disapprovals and keep Shopping ads running smoothly without constant manual intervention 

However, these updates only work if Googlebot can reliably crawl your product pages and clearly understand the data on them. This requires accurate structured data that explicitly defines price, availability, and condition where relevant. If this information is missing, inconsistent, or outdated, Google may struggle to match what’s in your feed with what’s shown on the product page leading to incorrect updates or product disapprovals. 

 6. Leverage external feed management tools for scalable updates

By utilising feed management tools such as FeedManager, you unlock powerful control over your feed, including bulk attribute rules. This makes it easier to manage large catalogues, combine multiple data sources, and apply structured logic without constantly changing your primary feed. 

7. Prioritise fixes based on impact

Not all issues are equally urgent. Merchant Center’s filters, such as click potential, issue type, and approval status help you focus on fixes that will have the biggest effect on impressions, traffic, and revenue, rather than spreading effort evenly across minor issues. 

Get in touch with the Productcaster team today  for expert support for Merchant Center issues, feed management and leverage from a 20% CPC discount.

Written by James Murgett