Merchant API migration: feed labels do not move on their own

Google is retiring the old Content API for Merchant Center in favour of the Merchant API. When your feed tool or agency completes the migration, products appear in Merchant Center, there are no warnings and everyone relaxes. The problem shows up a week later: spend on Shopping and Performance Max campaigns has quietly dropped.

The cause is very often the feed label. The campaign was pulling products through a specific feed label; during migration the products were assigned a different label or none at all. The campaign still looks for the old label, finds no matching products, and raises no error.

Google Ads does not flag this as an error. The campaign does not say “no eligible products”; it simply shows no impressions. In a Shopping campaign the product groups go empty, in Performance Max the asset group's product list falls to zero. Because spend goes down, at first glance it can even look like savings.

The real damage is on the revenue side: your best-selling products have been out of the auction for days. The only way to notice is to monitor the product count at campaign level regularly.

Before the migration, take a snapshot of the account: how many products are eligible in each Shopping and Performance Max campaign, which feed label each uses, and the last seven days of spend and conversions. In Tecrube that is one request, and the result is kept in your panel as the reference for the post-migration comparison.

Without a baseline you can only answer “did something change?” by feel. With one, you answer with numbers.

Check one: does every asset group and product group still see products? Ask in chat to “compare eligible product counts in all Shopping and PMax campaigns against the baseline”; the campaigns that dropped are listed. Check two: who changed what in the change history? A tool may have rewritten the feed label setting during the migration.

Check three: does the feed label value on the products in Merchant Center match what the campaign expects? If not, you fix either the campaign's label or the products' label; in Tecrube the campaign-side fix arrives as a preview and is written on approval. Check four: watch product counts and spend every day for the first week. A single check is not enough.

In the old API products were separated by “target country”; in the new model the feed label takes that role, and the label is free text. During migration some tools write the target country as the label (“TR”), some leave it empty, some use their own naming. The campaign sees only an exact match; even “TR” and “tr” are different.

If you sell to several countries the confusion grows: the Germany campaign may start seeing Turkish products, or nothing at all. Asking in chat to “tabulate every campaign's feed label setting and the product label distribution in Merchant Center” exposes the mismatches at a glance.

Fixing on the campaign side is usually safer: a bulk change to product labels can be reverted by the feed tool's next run, while a campaign label is permanent. In Tecrube a campaign label change arrives as a preview and is applied on approval; for feed-side changes, go to your feed tool's settings.

Do not raise the budget because spend fell; with no products the budget will not flow, you just distort the settings. Do not delete and rebuild the campaign; you lose learning data, and if the real issue is on the feed side the new campaign stays empty too. Fix the label, wait a day, then decide.

If your feed tool handled the migration, check its label mapping as well; some tools populate the label field from a different source in the new API.

Sign up for Tecrube, connect your Google Ads account and run the four checks above in one chat using part of your 75 free credits. If a fix is needed you see the preview, approve it, and watch the campaign start seeing products again the next day from the same conversation.