Your Google Ads account has been suspended

This plugin seemed like a simple way to add the structured data and product feed to my Woocommerce store to enable Google to list my products in their shopping listings. However, it’s not been particularly simple.

The setup is an odd modal experience that takes over the entire WordPress admin screen, such that I can’t access any other parts of WordPress during the setup of this plugin. That turned out to be an issue because of a conflict with my caching plugin. I can’t say exactly why, but I had to turn off my object cache in order to get this plugin’s setup screens to display properly. Nonetheless, the setup of a new store connecting to a new set of profiles in Google seemed to work fine.

However, after setup things have not gone so well. First, the newly created Google Ads account was immediately suspended, before I actually did anything with it (past creating it) either directly or through the plugin. The automated message from Google: “Your Google Ads account ?878-475-9615 has been suspended for violating our Circumventing Systems policy. Suspended accounts are prohibited from showing ads in all locations.” Now, I was able to appeal the suspension that Google quickly restored it, but within an hour it was automatically suspended a second time. Since the Google Ads account is optional, I disconnected it from the plugin and hopefully that will help.

A second issue I noticed is that the plugin adds a gtag tracker to my site, with no configuration options and no obvious way to disable this feature. Once I disconnected the Google Ads account (above) the plugin also removed the tracking code, which is one way of doing things, but it seems like there ought to be more options. What if I don’t want Google tracking my site? What if I already have Google Analytics set up and already have all the tracking tags I need? What if I didn’t realize that the plugin added the tracking code and didn’t know to warn my visitors of it?

Finally, to the thing I actually wanted out of the plugin: the product feed to a Google Merchant account: This appeared to be a set-it-and-done configuration, but according to my Merchant Account there are problems with the feed as it was set out of the box. Specifically, it said that there is “Missing shipping information” and “missing identifiers [gtin, mpn, brand].” Despite configuring shipping information in the plugin, that information didn’t make its way to Google. Additionally, brand and product identifiers were not set during setup and there was no prompt on the need to set anything else. Fortunately the plugin has a way to customize the feed, and since I’ve done this before I knew what to do. However, it’s not clear that it’s working yet; I may have to wait a few days for Google to review my account before I can be sure.

The product feed is brokered through a WordPress.com account, for better or for worse. I’m not sure if there’s a benefit to this to those using the plugin, but it means I had to connect my store to WordPress.com and there’s no feed I can view by hand to verify the information being sent to Google. I can verify the information that Google receives, but relying on this third party link seems like it’s just adding another point of failure. I guess we’ll see.

I haven’t decided whether to keep using this plugin or not. I’ve had good experience with another feed plugin that doesn’t require WordPress.com. While this other plugin required a little more technical know-how to get it working, at least it didn’t claim to be fully automatic when it wasn’t able to be. We’ll see how things turn out over the next few days.

• This topic was modified 4 months, 3 weeks ago by kennethrg.