Fixing the Google Shopping problem where no products show up even though the product ads are searchable

I have been battling this problem with Product Ads for some time. Our Products Ads were supposedly search-able but we could not find them using Google Shopping. We could find our products via a standard Google search and via Google Shopper on my android phone. In the last email of this continuing saga of questionable product support I saw a telephone number. Previous phone calls by our marketing guy had Google support recommending that he increase the bid amount and open the server up for Google bot searches. None of those recommendations worked but I really did not have a choice. So I called Google and they recommended that I add a default product ad extension for all products. Hmm… Here’s the steps:

  1. Bring up your product listing ads campaign, My Product Listing Ads.
  2. Click on the Ad Extensions tab.
  3. In my case the Ad Extensions area of the screen was blank, so I clicked on the New Extension button.
  4. There was only one choice for me, All products, so I selected it. Now I have one Ad Extension on my screen for all products.
  5. The person from Google said it would take about 12 hours for it to process.

This morning our products are searchable in Google Shopping from most desktops and we are back into the comparisons. I guess that a default product extension is a necessary step. See the picture below for an example.

We still have the problem where we get different search results from different browsers and laptops. My desktop using Chrome seems to be using an old version of shopping results where as my Firefox browser on the same computer retrieves current shopping results. I guess Chrome uses a cached version and will eventually catch up. Another new change for Google Shopping is that  "site:" does not work any more. It is fascinating that Bing and Google have had so many problems with shopping search engines.

Campaign Management_2012-10-30_10-59-37a