Product Feeds - Common Errors & Troubleshooting
Troubleshooting errors in feeds is crucial to the program’s health.
If a feed has never successfully processed (that is, never processed without errors), then no feed will be available for publishers to retrieve.
If the feed has previously successfully processed but is now displaying errors, then publishers will be retrieving the feed based on the last successful process.
To ensure publishers are retrieving correct, up-to-date feed data, errors in feeds should be rectified as soon as possible.
Our product feed platform allows advertisers to leverage much more control with feed management, providing visibility when there are errors, but also what the error is, allowing for advertiser feed content handling.
Managing Feeds in the Platform
Feed Re-Fetching
After changes have been made to a product feed, it will need ‘re-fetching’ so that we can check if the feed is processing successfully.
Feeds will automatically re-fetch based on the frequency added in the feed settings (this is typically daily). However, advertiser users are able to manually re-fetch the feed if necessary.
Note, no immediate change will display in the platform after hitting the “Refetch” button, however the processing has been queued and when re-visiting the program’s feed area a few minutes after requesting the refetch, you should notice that the feed has been re-fetched.
Downloading the Error Log
For each error that may occur when processing a feed, an error log can be downloaded to show a full list of the problems found. This includes identifying which products are experiencing the error, allowing the client to easier fix the issue.
Common Feed Errors:
Some examples of more common errors when processing feeds have been included below.
Fetching Error
If a feed could not be fetched for any reason, then the feed will be marked as ERROR. The platform will display a fetching error along with the status code that was returned. This status code should help you understand why the feed could not be fetched.
E.g.:
404 – Feed not found
403 – Feed could not be accessed due to permissions (is the feed locked?)
IPs to whitelist:
18.132.235.95
18.133.40.185
18.132.163.150
Please also ensure any blocker bots are disabled, as this can block even if IPs are whitelisted.
Missing Required Fields
Please ensure you add all 9 mandatory fields before uploading your feed. The required fields are:
id, title, description, link, image_link, availability, price, google_product_category, shipping
It’s important that the headers for these fields match the specified format exactly, else the feed will error in processing.
Invalid Categories
Feeds must provide categories matching the Google Shopping specification.
If our system finds errors in the first 100 categories the processing will be abandoned to save resources, so please be aware that you might have more than 100 erroneous categories.
Please remember to check the history log for the affected feed. The log can be downloaded to view which products had invalid categories
Too Many Custom Fields
If a product feed exceeds the limit of 10 custom fields, then the feed will not be processed. The status of the feed will be marked as ERROR and the information will be visible in the history log for that feed - see screenshot above.
To resolve this, you will need to lower the number of custom fields to 10.
Incorrect Column Count
Incorrect column count happens when the number of headers does not match the number of fields provided for the items.
This can sometimes happen when a comma or semi-colon separated file (CSV) uses commas or semi-colons within the item name or description.
For example:
id, | title, | description, |
123 | exampletitle | example, description |
In this example, we are using comma for the column separator, but as there is a comma in the description itself the system will count this as a separate column, and return the Incorrect Column Count error (as it would appear as 4 columns, instead of 3). The advertiser will need to ensure that the column separator (in this case, a comma) is not used within the actual product data fields.
Missing Energy Efficiency Field
Programs with electronic devices are required to specify the energy efficiency class for certain devices, as required by the EU [Regulation (EU) 2017/1369]. For the list of products, and additional information, please view here: Which Products require Energy Efficiency Classification in a product feed?
For CSV files, you will need to add an extra field energy_efficiency_class. For XML, an extra tag is required <g:energy_efficiency_class>A+</g:energy_efficiency_class>.
Sub-attributes and Repeated Fields
Our platform also supports the ability to include sub-attributes for both CSV and XML feeds. This is most common with the shipping field, which you may see formatted like this:
1<item>
2 <g:id>TV_198536</g:id>
4 <g:shipping>
5 <g:country>AUS</g:country>
6 <g:service>Standard</g:service>
7 <g:price>14.99 USD</g:price>
8 </g:shipping>
9</item>This allows you to include more shipping information for each product. Please refer to the Google Shopping specification to see a complete list of fields supporting sub-attributes.
Some fields can be repeated for a product e.g. shipping, product_type and additional_image_link. We also support this, allowing you to provide additional shipping information, product data and image links for each product.
Incorrect XML Format
XML Feed does not match either of the two supported formats, RSS 2.0 or Atom 1.0
The feed needs to match one of our supported formats:
RSS 2.0 specs: https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html
Atom 1.0 specs: https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/160593?hl=en-GB
Maximum Number of Feeds Limit Reached
By default, there is a maximum of 25 feeds permitted per merchant account. This means that if you are an advertiser that has multiple programs with Webgains under 1 Merchant (Advertiser) account, you may need more than 25 feeds.
If more than 25 feeds are required, please place contact your account manager, or support@webgains.com requesting how many feeds are needed.