So recently we had one of our manufacturers complaining that we were selling items below their MAP (minimum advertised price) The problem is that we didn't even have the products on our website or in the feed. We couldn't figure out how these were showing for items we were not sending to Google Merchant Center.
Then I got to looking around and found a setting where you can authorize Google to auto discover products that hadn't been sent to them. Again these products were not on our site or the feed. Google's AI apparently was deciding that they were products that other retailers were listing in the same widget industry and decided to display ads that then click over to another version of said widget.
We had to turn that "Auto Discover" feature off to make it stop.
It's a tool where Google will crawl your webpages to search for promotions and automatically import these promotions in Google Merchant Center.
It was under Data Sources click the triple dots next to your source name to be able to turn on and off this "feature"
So not only were we being charged for clicks that were not getting the customer what they were looking for, but they were also getting us into potential trouble with our suppliers.
