Posted:
With less than three months to Black Friday, the holiday shopping season is quickly approaching. We know that advertisers with Product Listing Ads campaigns are in search of new ways to optimize their product data and drive more traffic to their stores.

Two weeks ago, we hosted Google Shopping Office Hours via Hangouts on Air to share general advice on data feeds and unique product identifiers. We saw great engagement and will be broadcasting additional sessions, deep-diving into topics that will help prepare your data feeds for the holidays. Below is a calendar of Google Shopping Office Hours for the upcoming months. We encourage you to attend sessions of interest. We’ll discuss the topic for the first 20 minutes then open up the forum to live Q&A. If you already know what you’d like to ask or want to request a topic, feel free to submit your responses here. Questions on the event pages below will also answered in the Q&A.

Troubleshooting Disapprovals 
Tuesday, September 24, 2013 @ 10:00 AM PT 
What do I do if my feed is disapproved? 
What are the common data feed and data quality pitfalls?
How do I ensure all my products are approved? 
Registration Link 

Scaling Inventory Updates 
Tuesday, October 8, 2013 @ 10:00 AM PT 
What are the best practices for updating and editing my feed? 
What are the various data feed upload methods? 
What are the pros and cons of each method? 
Registration Link

Optimizing Product Attributes 
Tuesday, October 22, 2013 @ 10:00 AM PT 
How do I improve my data quality? 
What should I optimize? 
Registration Link

Posted by Chris Azalde, Product Specialist, Google Shopping
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Posted:
(Cross-posted from the Google Inside Adwords Blog)

A few weeks ago, we announced that we’ll soon be enforcing the new unique product identifier requirements to continue improving data quality on Google Shopping. These new specifications help us serve better results to users while creating more opportunities for merchants. We highly recommend making the necessary changes to comply with data quality requirements, as better data quality is a key lever to improve the performance of your Product Listing Ads campaigns.

Beginning on September 16th, all previously exempt accounts in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom as well as all accounts in Australia, Brazil, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Spain, Italy, Japan, and the Netherlands will begin to be subject to these new requirements. By November, all violating offers will be rejected and will not be served through Product Listing Ads. These new feed specifications are already being enforced for all accounts in the United States and non-exempt accounts in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

In September, we’ll also begin enforcing correct use of the ‘identifier exists’ attribute. To avoid disruption to your traffic, please ensure that you’re only submitting ‘identifier exists’ with a value of FALSE in categories where unique product identifiers are required but no such identifier exists for an item (for example, custom goods). Please review the latest product feed specification to learn more.

To help merchants with this transition, we’ll be broadcasting Google Shopping Office Hours via a Hangout on Air on Tuesday, August 27, 2013 at 9:30 am Pacific Time. We encourage you to join us to get advice about data feeds and unique product identifiers. If you already know what you’d like to ask, feel free to post it in the comments now. You’ll be able to submit questions during the Hangout on Air as well.

 Posted by Angelika Rohrer, Program Manager, Google Shopping
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