Linked Merchant Center and Google Ads accounts

  • Linking your Google Ads account to your Google Merchant Center account is required before creating a Shopping campaign.

  • The standard process for linking accounts involves sending a link request from Merchant Center and approving it in Google Ads.

  • Link requests can be sent through the Merchant Center web interface or the Content API for Shopping.

  • Link requests can be managed (approved or rejected) in the Google Ads web interface or via the Google Ads API.

  • Direct linking without an invitation is possible using the Google Ads API if the user is an administrator on both accounts.

Google Merchant Center is a tool that helps you upload your store and product data to Google and make it available for Shopping ads and other Google services. Linking your Merchant Center account to your Google Ads account allows your product data to flow into Google Ads for use in campaigns.

Account linking overview

Before you can create Shopping campaigns, you must first link your Google Ads account to a Merchant Center account. There are three ways to establish a link:

  1. Direct linking: If you have administrative access to both the Google Ads account and the Merchant Center account, you can link them immediately.
  2. Link invitations: If you do not have administrative access to both accounts, you must send a link invitation from your Merchant Center account and accept it in your Google Ads account.
  3. Business Manager: If both accounts are managed by the same Business Manager account, they are linked automatically.

The following sections provide details on each of these methods, as well as how to manage and verify existing links.

Create direct links

If the user attempting to establish the link has administrative access to both the Google Ads account and the Merchant Center account, you can use the direct linking flow to link the accounts immediately without requiring a separate invitation and approval.

There are two ways to directly link your accounts:

  • If initiating the link from Merchant Center, use the Merchant API propose method.
  • If initiating the link from Google Ads, use the Google Ads API ProductLinkService.CreateProductLink method and set product_link.merchant_center.merchant_center_id to the target Merchant Center account ID.

If you don't have administrative access to both accounts, you must use a link invitation flow to establish a link.

There are two ways to send a link invitation:

  1. Use the Merchant Center web interface to send a link invitation.
  2. Use the Merchant API for account linking to propose a new service link.

You can run a Google Ads API report using the following GAQL query to retrieve a list of all pending link invitations for a Google Ads customer ID from a Merchant Center account:

SELECT
    product_link_invitation.resource_name,
    product_link_invitation.merchant_center.merchant_center_id,
    product_link_invitation.type,
    product_link_invitation.status
FROM product_link_invitation
WHERE product_link_invitation.status = 'PENDING_APPROVAL'
    AND product_link_invitation.type = 'MERCHANT_CENTER'

To retrieve all link invitations regardless of status (such as ACCEPTED, REQUESTED, or PENDING_APPROVAL), remove the filtering condition for the product_link_invitation.status field in the preceding query.

Accept a link invitation

You can approve a pending link invitation from a Merchant Center account in one of two ways:

Reject a link invitation

You can reject a pending link invitation from a Merchant Center account in one of two ways:

If a link invitation is rejected, it cannot be subsequently accepted. Instead, a new invitation must be proposed.

Business Manager is a unified representation of a business on Google. When you manage both your Google Ads account and your Merchant Center accounts using a Business Manager account, Business Manager automatically creates links between your Google Ads account and the Merchant Center account. You can retrieve these links using the Google Ads API, but these links cannot be mutated with the Google Ads API.

You can manage and verify existing links between your Merchant Center and Google Ads accounts using the Google Ads API.

You can run a Google Ads API report using the following GAQL query to retrieve a list of active Merchant Center links for a Google Ads customer ID:

SELECT
    product_link.resource_name,
    product_link.merchant_center.merchant_center_id,
    product_link.product_link_id,
    product_link.type
FROM product_link
WHERE product_link.type = 'MERCHANT_CENTER'

You can unlink your accounts using either the Google Ads API or the Merchant API, depending on which product you're using to initiate the unlink request. Unlinking an account requires administrative access and prevents active Shopping campaigns linked to that Merchant Center account from serving product ads.

If you're initiating the unlink request from Google Ads, use the Google Ads API ProductLinkService.RemoveProductLink method and pass the product_link.resource_name retrieved from the product_link report.

If you're initiating the unlink request from Merchant Center, use the Merchant API for account linking accounts.services.reject method on the active service link.

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