Let’s tie together the loose threads inside Google’s advertising, analytics and retail merchant businesses. Those threads are loose because the Google platform appears to be unraveling.
Over the past month alone, there was a major Google Search ranking bug, a calamitous data breach involving Google Ads and Google Merchant Center and outages across Google Ads, the Analytics API outages and Google Merchant Center.
Just last week, Google Analytics resolved a new bug, after basic site reporting information had been missing for several days.
Why is all this happening?
Google claims these system errors are unrelated to the back-end and front-end product changes that were being pushed live, often at the exact same time, including a new Search Core update, the final transition from Universal Analytics to GA and the force shift from legacy Google Merchant Center to the new version (called GMC Next).
The history
Meta’s and Amazon’s advertising platforms suffered for years from major glitches and account misconduct. It was new, though, for Google to have such apparent bugs in its system.
The narrative thread between Big Tech platform cock-ups is that those companies replaced human product and account services en masse with often flawed AI-based software.
Last year, I reported on the feeling of dread among Google Merchant Center and Google Ads customers after a platform glitch led to a spate of incorrectly suspended accounts.
Google’s wave of account suspensions sometimes stemmed from obvious miscues, like Merchant Center flagging an account for shady pricing practices when Google was clearly pulling price info from the wrong part of the site.
Some accounts couldn’t reach a human rep for days. When they finally did, they fixed what was a debilitating issue in just a minute or two.
Googling in the dark
But Google account systems are going haywire for a reason aside from their overreliance on AI tech. The company is also rearchitecting its consumer and business-facing businesses for new privacy and competition standards.
Google Analytics forced all customers from the legacy product – which most users preferred – to GA4, which includes new privacy-focused features. Likewise, GMC customers that haven’t yet switched to GMC Next are being “upgraded” this month, which is Google’s language, from its email notification to clients.
And Google Ads is being integrated with GMC and GA4 in new ways, which adds risk and complexity.
Consider the recent Google Ads and Merchant Center joint glitch. Google Ads accounts were serving products from the wrong GMC accounts, and ecommerce advertisers and agencies were complaining about GMC Next incorrectly pulling products.
In June, this newsletter reported on GMC quietly dropping “Feeds,” the structured data pipes that Google customers use to update accounts, including for product catalogues, prices and out-of-stock notices.
Google hasn’t disclosed what went wrong with the data breach between Ads and Merchant Center. Although, what Google does disclose doesn’t always reflect lived experience.
In that case, Google says the GMC-Ads glitch persisted for less than a day. But ecommerce advertisers using those platforms claim the issue went on for at least two weeks.
Screenshots shared with AdExchanger at the time showed data between accounts being cross-pollinated from weeks before. But that evidence is no longer available. Google froze the Merchant Center system and reset the data, meaning there is no historical data from that glitch available aside from what people happened to capture themselves.
To be fair, Google can’t let product and account info appear in unrelated or competitive accounts.
But Google’s claim that this was a one-day bug is galling – considering that the evidence has been scrubbed.
