Google & YouTube

The app is easy to use, but it ended up costing us significant advertising performance.

Our Google Merchant Center feed repeatedly broke and was automatically repopulated. Then, around June 2026, the app migrated our product IDs from the localized `shopify_US_` format to the new `shopify_ZZ_` format. Since Google Ads treats different product IDs as entirely new products, this effectively reset years of product-level performance history and Smart Bidding signals.

Google Ads Support confirmed that there is no automatic mapping between the old and new product IDs, so historical bidding signals and product-level performance cannot be transferred after the IDs change. They also advised ensuring country markets and shipping settings were correctly configured, as this should allow localized IDs (such as `shopify_US_`) to be generated. We verified our market configuration and followed their recommendations, but the app continued generating only `shopify_ZZ_` IDs, with no option to manually restore the original format.

For merchants relying on Performance Max or Shopping campaigns, this is a serious issue because stable product IDs are critical for maintaining optimization history. The app itself is straightforward to use, but this change cost us considerable time, advertising budget, and campaign performance, with no practical way to recover the historical product IDs.

I have had non-stop trouble with Google Merchant. I have a very long-running YT channel (16 years) and 5 major websites. I loaded every possible disclaimer, return policy, and anything else Google demanded. It worked fine for a while and then...poof. Gone. "Your Google Merchant account is suspended for TOS..." So I dig around, add more return policies etc in every website possible. It works for a few weeks and then...poof. 60+ hours wasted. I decided to terminate my Google Merchant account. What a waste of time. But wait...there's more. To top it off, Google now says my Google Ads account is suspended because my Google Merchant (GM) account is suspended. I jump through hoops to tell Google that I deleted my GM account. My Google Ads account is re-instated...for about 3 weeks. Then the bot says "Suspended..." So I do this absurd cycle for 6 freakin months. Google cannot/will not fix this. They won't tell me EXACTLY what is wrong with my GM account. So, in the end, I gave this a "Google is a horrible, negligent business 'partner'" rating. Endless emails to Google are responded with robot/AI responses. If there's a human behind it, it's impossible to tell. "Just look at our TOS and comply...." Lol. I've seen $20M businesses have their GM accounts suspended with the same problems. FYI - I run multiple businesses, YT channels, etc. and this was by far the worst experience. Hope it works better for you, YMMV, best of luck.

It is quite useful to connect Google & YouTube to get better data and therefore better decision-making to adjust the budget for ads and where to focus your financial resources.