As of October 2016, if you are searching for products that are not native to your country’s location, you will notice that the Google shopping results will not show up. Before when you for example visited google.co.uk and search for a product you would get shopping results among text ads. Or if you go to google.co.uk/shopping you would see products relevant to the search. Instead what you see in the Shopping Search is a blank page and only text ads on Web Search.
So why has this happened?
Not really sure why they did this, but can assume that Google only wants to show products that are native country to the searcher’s country location. Which in a sense is a good idea, as I manage to a lot of Google Ads clients, I think this is a good move. However, it has created a little wake of issues for people who need to check results in a country not native to their location. This problem is for agencies, freelancers and individuals that want to visually see shopping ad results.
What should you do now?
Currently, there is no real workaround and recommend doing two things :
- post a reply on Google’s official advertising community to get Google’s attention.
- Contact Google’s official help line
Is there an alternative?
Currently, there are three methods :
- Rely on Google Ads data, which should be your first line of offense, however I do too require sometimes to look at ads visually
- In that case I use a service such as semrush (paid service), below is a screenshot of what to expect
