I bought a laser cutter and some other production equipment, and started making home decor. I sell pretty simple stuff, like door signs and coasters.
Google Merchant Center also suspended my account for being "misleading". I have no ads, just a product feed for Google Shopping. They won't tell me what's "misleading" about my products.
PS: Now I know how I know your name :) Thanks for making that great HN responses email tool!
https://gitlab.com/stavros/hn-reply-bot
I posted it but not many people seem to use Telegram, or find it useful?
And email somehow fits better the calm pace of discussion here on HN.
Google's customer support just provides form responses linking to this policy my store violates: https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/6150127?hl=en
But they won't provide any concrete information specific to my store, and I can't figure out what they're hung up on. I talked to a Shopify expert and they told me to make sure I have a contact page, refund policy and accept credit cards -- all of which I do.
Your shop looks very nice, actually. Cool and thoughtful stuff.
As I mentioned above, my google merchant center account also got suspended twice.
Was that experience unusual? And couldn't those people help you making your ad adherent to whatever rule Google uses?
But yes. It was great. I felt like I had a dial that I could turn up and down to make my business go.
Then, bam, second suspension.
"Misleading ads".
I have no intention to mislead anyone.
Makes me feel very helpless.
This is funny. It seems that having an ad blocker is a strong indicator for people that are very interested in technical stuff (and are at least technically literate enough to install it). This sounds like a prime spot for placing certain ads. Since ad-blocking is detectable, we coders are actually opting-in to this kind of labeling. I don't know what to make of that.
Did you have to tune your Google ads campaign before it worked or did it work for you from the first try?
This isn't really possible on any other platforms, since nobody goes to twitter with the "I want to buy an e-paper calendar" intent.
And yes, I tuned my ads heavily to these search queries, but in the end the automated google shopping campaign worked better.
The algorithms claim that my ads are misleading. I don't think they are, I hope they aren't.
The first time, I appealed and it got un-suspended. No reason given. I thought: Cool, must have been a mistake but it's been sorted out.
Then, after a couple days, another suspension.
Now I don't know what to do.
Google ads and google merchant center seems to be a science in itself, but I don't have the time to learn it all, nor the budget to pay a consultant.