Australian Google Merchant Centre accounts get suspended more often than they should — usually for return policy gaps, price mismatches, and misrepresentation flags that a feed audit would have caught

Google Merchant Centre suspends Australian accounts most commonly for misrepresentation policy violations, which include a return policy that exists on the website but is not linked in GMC's business information settings, a checkout price that does not match the feed price (including GST inclusion discrepancies), a store URL in GMC that does not exactly match the verified domain, and promotional language on the website that GMC flags as misleading or unsubstantiated. To fix a misrepresentation suspension, you need to identify which specific condition triggered it — not all of them will apply — make the required change, and submit a reinstatement request with documentation showing the issue has been resolved. Google's standard help centre guidance does not tell you which condition caused the suspension, which is why most reinstatement attempts fail on the first submission.

Free product listing clicks from Google Merchant Centre arrive in GA4 as `google / organic` by default, which makes them indistinguishable from standard organic search traffic unless UTM parameters are applied. To track free listing revenue separately, you apply UTM parameters to the product landing page URLs in the GMC feed — for example, `utm_source=google&utm_medium=free-listing&utm_campaign=shopping-organic` — and then create a custom channel group in GA4 that identifies this source/medium combination as a distinct channel. Once configured, you can report free listing sessions, conversions, and revenue separately from paid Shopping and from standard organic search in the GA4 Acquisition report.

A supplemental feed is a secondary data source in Google Merchant Centre that overrides or adds to attributes in the primary feed without changing the source catalogue. To create one for title optimisation, you build a spreadsheet (Google Sheet or a feed tool like DataFeedWatch) containing the product ID column and a revised `title` column with Shopping-query-optimised versions written for Australian search behaviour. The supplemental feed is connected to GMC and configured to override the title attribute from the primary Shopify feed. Your Shopify product names remain unchanged. The supplemental feed titles are what appear in Shopping ads and free listings. Any feed management tool that supports supplemental feeds can also inject custom labels, fix missing attributes, and update pricing from the same file.

Custom labels are five optional feed attributes (custom_label_0 through custom_label_4) that you define and populate with any values you choose. They are invisible to buyers and do not appear in Shopping ads — they exist only to allow campaign-level product segmentation inside Google Ads. A common AU e-commerce configuration uses custom_label_0 for margin tier (high / mid / low), custom_label_1 for bestseller status (top-10 / standard), and custom_label_2 for seasonal relevance (evergreen / summer / winter). Inside a Performance Max campaign, these labels allow you to set different ROAS targets for high-margin versus low-margin products, or to allocate more budget to bestsellers during peak season. Custom labels must be set at the feed level — they cannot be added inside Google Ads.

To link Merchant Centre to Performance Max, the GMC account must first be linked to the Google Ads account under the "Linked accounts" section in GMC settings. Once linked, when you create a Performance Max campaign in Google Ads and select "Shopping" as the conversion goal, you will be prompted to select the linked Merchant Centre account and choose which products from the feed to include. You can include all products or filter by product type, brand, custom label, or other feed attributes. The feed must have at least one approved product to create a PMax Shopping campaign. If the GMC account has policy warnings or a high disapproval rate, PMax performance will be constrained even if the campaign is technically running.