Preparing for Planned Site Outages

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 that can include product disapprovals. So 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 product data feed being sent to Google, 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 this excluded_destination field, will help tell Google to not show ads on these products and also removes them from Google's data quality check process, thus avoiding disapprovals.


• These values would only need to exist in the feed for the time when the site 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, helping your ads to hit the group running. Learn more about the excluded_destination field here or contact VersaFeed for other use cases.