With feeds per country, partial feeds every hour, rules, marketing supplemental feeds, calculated labels and AI-written titles, the feed is a system with several hands on it. Without governance, the day something breaks nobody knows what broke or who broke it. This lesson closes the module with the operating side: owners, versions, alerts and the manual.
The map of owners
| Layer | Attributes | Owner | Changes because of |
|---|---|---|---|
| Primary feed (platform) | id, link, images, price, stock, variants, GTIN, brand | Ecommerce / IT | New catalogue items, price changes |
| Margin table | custom_label_0 | Finance | Cost or price changes |
| Merchant rules | Mappings, template titles, calculated labels | Marketing (Shopping) | New categories, template changes |
| Marketing supplemental feed | Bespoke titles, highlights, temporary exclusions | Marketing | Tests, campaigns |
| Automatic supplemental feed | Performance label, low stock | Script | Daily |
| Extra feeds | Promotions, reviews, local | Marketing / Shops | Campaigns, inventory |
The rule: every attribute has one owner and one layer where it is
written. Two layers writing title (a rule and a supplemental feed)
with no defined priority is the most common cause of "the title changed
and nobody knows why".
Versions and rollback
- Primary feed: the platform regenerates it; keep a daily copy (file or table) for 30 days so you can compare "what changed".
- Rules: every change with date, author and reason in a log (a sheet); Merchant does not version rules.
- Supplemental feeds: sheets with a version and date column; rollback = restore the previous row.
- AI titles: a version per product; batch rollback.
- Big changes (a new category template, a new country feed) in preview and during low-traffic hours.
Alerts: a broken feed shows up in Google Ads before it does in Merchant
| Signal | What it means | Who raises it |
|---|---|---|
| Active products drop 10%+ from one day to the next | Incomplete feed, mass disapprovals, expiry | Script (reads Merchant/Ads) |
| The catalogue's average price jumps | Currency, VAT, a shifted column | Script |
| Shopping impressions fall with the budget untouched | Broken feed or suspension | Guardian / the Agent |
| New disapprovals > N | A change on the website or in the feed | Merchant diagnostics (and a script) |
| Clicks with no sales on products that used to sell | Price/stock out of date | Shopping Ninja |
Supplemental feed with id values that do not match |
Formatting, capitalisation | Script |
The first three are checked with a daily read of the product count and the average price: two figures that catch 80% of feed disasters before they cost you a weekend.
The quarterly audit
- Quality: % with no GTIN, short titles, no additional image, no
product_type, no margin. - Feed ↔ website consistency on a sample (price, stock, title).
- Rules: do they still make sense? Is any of them overwriting something good?
- Supplemental feeds: orphan rows (products that no longer exist), titles from finished tests.
- Labels: distribution (90% of the catalogue in "neutral"? the rule is not discriminating).
- Country feeds: prices, shipping, language.
- Expired promotions; active reviews; local inventory up to date.
- Change log complete; owners still current.
The operating manual
A short document that lets someone new (or you, a year from now) run the catalogue: the map of owners, where each file and sheet lives, how the primary feed is generated, what each rule does and why, how to roll back, which alerts exist and who receives them, the daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly routine, and the contact details for IT and for the platform. You review it whenever a layer changes. It is your insurance against a change of platform, of agency or of employee — the three moments when feeds really do break.
💡 Ninja trick: the daily product count and the average price —the two figures that catch almost everything— are trivial for a script and nobody looks at them by hand. Shopping Ninja records them in its sheet every night and the Agent raises the alarm when they move; the rest of the audit stays quarterly and human, with the manual as the script to follow.
What you should remember
- One owner and one layer per attribute; a defined priority between rules and supplemental feeds.
- Versions of the primary feed (a daily copy), of the rules (a log) and of supplemental feeds (a column); batch rollback.
- Daily alerts: product count, average price, Shopping impressions, disapprovals.
- A quarterly audit and an operating manual: the catalogue survives changes of platform and of team.
End of Module 7. Module 8 goes into GAQL and the API: reading what the interface does not show.