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Product feed health checker

This checker turns four problems you can count in Merchant Center into a single health score out of 100, an estimate of how many products can actually serve in ads, and a pointer to which fix to start with. You enter the number of products in the feed and the share of them affected by each problem: missing GTINs where the manufacturer assigns one, disapproved items, price mismatches between the feed and the landing page, and weak titles that omit brand, attributes or the words shoppers search. Each problem is weighted by how badly it hurts delivery. Disapprovals and price mismatches weigh more than titles because they stop products serving at all. It does not read your feed. It scores what you tell it.

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Feed health score out of 100

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Products eligible to serve
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Fix first (1 = disapprovals, 2 = GTINs)
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Plain arithmetic on your inputs. Nothing is sent anywhere. Not a forecast.

How the score is weighted

The score starts at 100 and loses points for each problem in proportion to its share of the feed. Every point of disapproved products costs 1.2, every point of price mismatch costs 1.0, every point of missing GTINs costs 0.6 and every point of weak titles costs 0.4. With 5 percent disapproved, 3 percent mismatched, 10 percent missing GTINs and 30 percent weak titles, the deductions are 6, 3, 6 and 12, leaving a score of 73. The score cannot go below zero. Eligible products is the feed size minus the disapproved share, because a disapproved product cannot serve no matter how good its title is.

Reading the fix first output

The third output is a simple rule. If the disapproved share is at least as large as the missing GTIN share, it shows 1 and you should clear the disapprovals first, because each one is a product that is invisible today. Otherwise it shows 2 and the GTIN gap is the larger problem, since products without a required identifier get limited or no exposure and may be disapproved later. Price mismatches are not in the rule because they should be fixed the day they appear regardless of scale. Each one is a live risk to the account, not just to the product, and the fix is usually a feed refresh schedule or a currency and tax setting rather than a product edit.

What feed health does to the visitors lever

The feed is the raw material for every Shopping and Performance Max impression, so its condition sets the ceiling on the visitors lever from paid search. Disapprovals and mismatches remove products from the auction. Missing GTINs reduce how often the remaining products are matched to searches. Weak titles let products serve but for the wrong queries, which spends budget on clicks that do not convert. A feed at 73 is leaving a quarter of its potential on the table before a single bid is set. Fix the feed and the same budget buys more relevant clicks, which also lifts the conversion rate of the traffic that arrives.

Questions

In Merchant Center, the diagnostics or needs attention view lists disapproved items and item-level issues, including missing GTIN and price mismatch counts. Divide each count by your total products. Weak titles you judge yourself by sampling: a title that lacks brand, product type or the defining attribute counts as weak.

A title that a shopper could not match to their search. Missing brand, missing the product type, missing the attribute that distinguishes variants such as size, colour or capacity, or leading with a marketing phrase instead of the product name. Sample fifty products and count.

Only products that the manufacturer has assigned one. Custom, handmade or vintage items do not have them and should be marked with identifier_exists set to false rather than left blank. Count only products that should have a GTIN and do not.

Merchant Center reports each issue separately and does not weight them. This score combines them into one number so you can track progress week to week. The underlying counts from Merchant Center remain the source of truth.

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