What is disapproval?
A disapproval is a decision by an advertising platform that a product or ad cannot be shown, because of a data error, a policy breach or a mismatch with your website.
Worked example, not a result
Grouping the problem instead of counting it
Say a store has 6,800 products and 355 of them are disapproved. Listed as a number, that looks like an enormous amount of work. Grouped by reason, it usually turns into two or three jobs.
One group might be an image problem across a whole supplier's range, because that supplier's photos carry a logo overlay. One might be a missing attribute on every item in a category, because the category was set up after the feed mapping was written. One might be a policy issue affecting a specific product type that needs either a different presentation or a decision not to advertise it.
Each of those is a single fix applied in bulk. Working through 355 individual products by hand, which is what stores usually do first, takes weeks and fixes nothing permanently, because the same cause keeps producing new disapprovals.
The counts above are made up for the example.
Why it matters
Disapproved products are invisible, and invisible products cannot be advertised, found or bought. That makes disapprovals a direct hole in the visitors lever, and one that no amount of budget or bidding work can compensate for.
They are also a leading indicator rather than a one off event. A store that lets warnings sit will see the affected items removed later, often in the middle of a trading period when the loss is most expensive. Watching the trend in disapproved items is a better early warning than watching revenue, because revenue only reacts after the products are already gone.
For a store owner the decision this drives is where a week of work goes. Fixing the cause of a group of disapprovals returns a whole shelf of products to the market permanently, which is usually worth more than any campaign adjustment made in the same week.
Common mistakes
- Fixing products one at a time. Disapprovals come in groups with shared causes, and the group is the unit of work.
- Requesting a review without changing anything. The item gets checked again and disapproved again, and repeated requests slow down the ones that matter.
- Ignoring warnings. Warnings are the queue for future disapprovals, and clearing them is far cheaper than recovering products after they stop being shown.
- Assuming a policy disapproval is a mistake. Some product types genuinely cannot be advertised in some countries, and the right response is a decision about the range rather than repeated appeals.
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