Mini-Study: Does Google Pause Feeds With Frequent Submissions?

By Tinuiti Team

May 01 2014

“When we submit a new feed every day, does Google Shopping pause our listings until the new feed fully reprocesses?”

This is a question I get a lot, and it’s certainly a legitimate concern. It makes sense because if Google’s mission is to provide the most up-to-date and accurate listings to customers, then its possible that they would temporarily suspend (for a very short period of time) product listings during a new feed update.

When a new feed is being submitted, the Merchant Center will show products as “Searchable soon” rather than “Active,” which can lead one to believe that listings are not active anymore.

I decided to do some digging around and investigate if this does in fact affect listings and, more importantly, campaign performance.

The Short Answer

To be honest, I can’t definitively say whether or not Google pauses listings during feed updates. But I can say with confidence that its effect is minimal at best.

The Long Answer

If we go with the idea that your products go into a suspension state after a feed is pushed, we would see a significant drop-off in impressions for Google Shopping compared to one of your text ad campaigns (which should see no effect with a feed) during the time that the feed is pushed (let’s just disregard potential day-parting for now).

Let’s take a look:

The above comparison breaks down impressions by hour. We can observe a few things here:

For Google Shopping, we see that the drop off begins at around 8pm every night by 15%, and continues to drop at a faster rate each hour after that
The feed here is set to pull at 10pm every night so we would expect a significant drop off starting then. However, the drops are relatively consistent from 9pm to around 1am – before the feed is pushed and well after the feed has been processed
The drops for Google Shopping compared to the text ad campaign are about on par in terms of when they happen and by how much (the text ad sees a significant drop off at 9pm as well)

So long story short, any drop we may see can be attributed to the time of day and the varying bids placed on those times of the day. However, if there is any concern of drops, 10pm is the optimal time to push the feed to avoid any worries.