I help diagnose feed, Merchant Center, and landing-page issues that limit product eligibility or make campaign performance harder to interpret. The work starts with the source data and ends with a verified campaign input.
Disapprovals, limitations, pending items, market settings, and destination coverage can remove important inventory from delivery.
An account can look like it is underperforming when the real issue is that a third of the catalog was never eligible to serve.
Titles, identifiers, price, availability, variants, images, shipping, and promotions need to agree with the store.
Titles do more work than most catalogs give them credit for, because they are the strongest signal Google has for matching a product to a query.
Feed groups and labels should help the account see best sellers, margins, seasonal products, and stock constraints.
Without labels reflecting business priority, campaigns treat a high-margin core product and a clearance item as equivalent.
Before judging any campaign, I compare the catalog against the active, eligible item count in Merchant Center and group every disapproval and limitation by root cause and severity. This turns a long alert list into a short, ranked set of real problems.
Every important attribute comes from somewhere: the platform, a feed app, a spreadsheet, a supplemental feed, or a manual override. I map which system owns each one and how often it refreshes, because a fix applied downstream of the real source gets overwritten at the next sync.
Recovery is ordered by commercial impact rather than by alert volume. Getting your best sellers eligible again matters more than clearing a large number of low-priority items, and it makes the improvement visible sooner.
Feeds do not stay fixed on their own. Guardian runs daily feed health checks inside Cardinal so coverage loss and new disapprovals surface while they are small, instead of being discovered a month later in a performance review.
These guides cover the pre-audit checklist, Performance Max cleanup, and recovery after an eligibility incident.
Disapprovals usually trace back to one of a few causes: a mismatch between the feed and the landing page on price or availability, missing or invalid product identifiers, a policy category that needs different handling, image or shipping requirements, or a site issue Google encountered while crawling. The category of disapproval matters more than the count, because a hundred items failing for one fixable reason is a much smaller job than ten failing for ten different reasons.
Often both, which is why it stalls. The symptom appears in Google Ads, the cause usually sits in the store, the feed app, or the theme, and neither side owns the whole path. I diagnose it end to end and brief whoever needs to make the change rather than sending a screenshot of the diagnostics tab and waiting.
Not always. Plenty of catalogs are served perfectly well by the native Shopify or platform feed once the source data is correct. A dedicated tool earns its cost when you need rule-based transformations, multiple markets or languages, frequent supplemental data, or feed logic the platform cannot express. Buying a tool to work around bad source data usually just moves the problem.
Once a fix is live, Merchant Center needs to recrawl and revalidate the affected items, and that timing is controlled by Google rather than by me. What is within our control is fixing the highest-severity causes first so the most commercially important inventory becomes eligible soonest, rather than working through the list in the order it happens to appear.
Sometimes, yes. If a meaningful share of the catalog is ineligible, or titles and product types are too weak for Google to match queries confidently, fixing the product data alone can change what Shopping and Performance Max are able to do. That is why feed work comes before restructuring campaigns rather than after.
It validates independently, so products approved by Google can still be disapproved there. If you run both channels, feed health has to be monitored on both rather than inferred from one. See Microsoft Ads for ecommerce for how the second channel is handled.
Share the products, markets, and Merchant Center issue that need attention first.