Feed product count monitoring

What is the feed product count?

A product feed is a file listing your store’s products that Google Merchant Center fetches from your website on a regular schedule. The feed product count is simply the number of items in that file: <item> or <entry> elements in an XML feed, or rows in a text file.

Normally, this number changes gradually: you add new arrivals and remove discontinued products. A sudden drop almost always means the feed is now being generated differently, and part of your catalog fell out of it without anyone deciding so.

It’s important to tell apart two different problems that look the same in your ads — the product simply doesn’t show:

According to Merchant Center Help, “Not approved” means the product can’t be shown on Google because one or more errors are blocking it (help article on product statuses). At least a disapproved product shows up in Merchant Center diagnostics. A missing one just vanishes from the list, so unless you count your products, you may never notice.

Why is a drop in your feed product count a problem?

The main risk is that products quietly disappear from your ads and from Google’s free listings. Merchant Center syncs your product list with the latest feed upload and deletes anything that isn’t in it. Google Help walks through an example:

A product stays in Merchant Center only if another data source provides it. For most stores, which have just one feed, a drop in the number of products in the file means the same drop in Merchant Center.

The exception is the product protection feature, which Google Help also calls the removal delay feature. It “is triggered by a significant drop in the number of products in a particular data source,” and when that happens, Merchant Center behaves differently:

In other words, the products don’t drop out of your ads right away — they just stop updating, and their prices and availability stay frozen at pre-outage values. Product protection is turned off by default. You turn it on in Merchant Center under Settings → General → Product protection and set a threshold: the percentage drop in products that triggers the protection. It only delays the consequences, though: you still need to find and fix whatever caused the drop in your feed.

From there, the missing product reaches your ads. According to Google Ads Help, Shopping ads use product data from Merchant Center rather than keywords, and Performance Max campaigns look at your product feed along with your budget (Google Ads Help). No product means no ads for it, even though the campaign keeps running and spending its budget on the rest of your catalog. The same goes for free listings on Search, the Shopping tab, Images and other Google services: they’re built from Merchant Center data too (Merchant Center Help).

It hurts most when your best sellers drop out. Clicks and spend may barely change, because the budget shifts to other products, while conversions go down.

Another trap is trying to “hide” a temporarily unavailable product by removing it from the feed. Google advises against it:

Why does the number of products in a feed drop?

The cause is almost always on the website side: your CMS or a plugin generates the feed, so any change to their settings or to the server changes what ends up in the file.

• CMS export filters. After a plugin update or a manual edit, a category, a brand or products missing a certain field — such as a barcode or an image — fall out of the feed.
• An “in stock only” filter. The plugin stops exporting out-of-stock products. Google, on the other hand, recommends keeping these products in the feed with out_of_stock in the availability attribute and removing only the ones you’ve discontinued for good.
• Plugin limits. Some plugins cap the number of products in a feed or build it in batches, and after a settings change only the first batch makes it into the file.
• Timeouts and running out of memory. With a large catalog, generating the feed runs past the server’s time limit, and the file gets cut off halfway. As far as Merchant Center is concerned, every product after the cutoff point simply doesn’t exist.
• Inventory sync failures. An import from your inventory or accounting system briefly zeroed out stock levels or prices, and the plugin excluded those products from the feed as invalid.
• Intentional catalog changes. A seasonal sale ended or an old collection was retired. A drop is expected here, but it’s still worth checking it against your plan.

How do you spot a problem with your feed product count?

The most reliable way to spot a problem is to compare today’s feed product count with yesterday’s and with the number of active products in your website’s catalog. Here are the typical patterns and what to do about them:

How to check your feed product count yourself

You’ll need a browser, your store’s admin panel and Merchant Center. The key is to write the number down every time, so you have something to compare against:

1. Open the feed URL in your browser, press Ctrl+U, and use Ctrl+F to count the <item> or <entry> elements. For a text feed, the product count is the number of rows minus the header.
2. Scroll to the bottom of the source and make sure the XML ends with a closing tag rather than breaking off in the middle of a product.
3. In your CMS, check how many products are active and published. Any gap with the feed should be explained by filters you set up on purpose.
4. In Merchant Center, open the product list and diagnostics: check the total count and how many products are “Not approved” or “Limited.”
5. Write down the result and repeat the check after every plugin update, import or catalog change.
6. Or use the FullCheckApp “Feed product count monitoring” check and get the results in a clear visual format.

Counting your products by hand once is easy. Doing it every day — and catching a drop before Merchant Center fetches an incomplete feed — is the hard part.

If you chose the last option, you’ve already made the right call: the check runs automatically, and you’ll be the first to know about any warning or critical issue.

What FullCheckApp checks

Once a day, at a time you choose, FullCheckApp downloads your product feed, counts the products in it and compares the number with the previous check. A sharp drop, such as from 1,284 to 640, shows up in your daily report.

• Product count — how many items are in the feed today and how many there were yesterday.
• Empty feed — if the file loads but has no products in it, the “Products” check is marked critical.
• Formats — products are counted in <item>, <entry>, <product> and <offer> elements.

Report colors: green means OK, yellow is a warning, and red is critical. You can set the severity of each check separately for every website. After each check, you get an email with the report, and critical issues are also sent to Telegram. Whether the feed itself loads and its XML can be read is covered in the Google Merchant Center feed check article. Product statuses in Merchant Center — approved, limited and disapproved — are covered by Google Shopping product monitoring.

FAQ

Sources

1. Google Merchant Center Help — Manage your data sourcessupport.google.com/merchants/answer/13982673?hl=en
2. Google Merchant Center Help — Availability [availability]support.google.com/merchants/answer/6324448?hl=en
3. Google Merchant Center Help — Check product visibility and status in Merchant Centersupport.google.com/merchants/answer/160491?hl=en
4. Google Merchant Center Help — Free listings for productssupport.google.com/merchants/answer/13889434?hl=en
5. Google Ads Help — About Shopping adssupport.google.com/google-ads/answer/2454022?hl=en
6. Google Merchant Center Help — Use the removal delay feature to protect your productssupport.google.com/merchants/answer/9596957?hl=en