Problem Google Ads

How to Fix Bing / Microsoft Shopping Feed Errors

Your products are disapproved or missing in Microsoft Merchant Center, so Bing Shopping ads don't show. Microsoft's feed rules overlap with Google's but aren't identical — importing a Google feed and assuming parity is the single most common cause of Bing-specific errors.

What this usually means in a real ad account

Bing / Microsoft Shopping Feed Errors is rarely caused by one isolated setting. In most accounts it is a signal that the campaign structure, audience, offer, landing page, or measurement setup is no longer aligned with the traffic you are buying. Before changing bids or rewriting every ad, look at the full path from impression to click to conversion. The platform can only optimize toward the signals you give it, so weak inputs tend to compound over time.

For Google Ads, the right fix starts with separating symptoms from causes. A bad metric tells you where to look, but not always what to change. For example, expensive clicks might come from poor relevance, aggressive bidding, competitive auctions, or irrelevant traffic that should never have entered the campaign. The diagnostic sequence below is designed to keep you from making random changes that make reporting harder to read.

Use this page as a working checklist. Open your ad account, compare the symptoms below with your actual numbers, then move through the causes and fixes one by one. If you change several things at once, write down what changed and when. That gives you a clean before-and-after window and makes the next optimization decision much easier.


Symptoms

  • Products approved in Google but disapproved in Microsoft Merchant Center
  • Bing Shopping ads not serving despite a live campaign
  • Feed marked 'processing failed' or offers dropped after a scheduled fetch
  • Far fewer active offers in Microsoft than in Google

Root Causes

  • Google feed imported into Microsoft and assumed to be 1:1 — Microsoft re-validates everything
  • Missing GTIN / MPN / Brand where Microsoft requires them for a category
  • Price or availability mismatch when the Bing bot crawls your product pages
  • Feed schedule fetch failing (URL, auth, or timeout) so offers go stale and expire
  • Product category / taxonomy differences from Google's product taxonomy
  • Microsoft-specific policy or market/currency settings not matching the destination country

How to Fix It

1

Treat Microsoft as a separate channel: validate the feed in Microsoft Merchant Center, don't trust Google parity

2

Add GTIN/MPN/Brand for every product Microsoft flags — its requirements are stricter in some categories

3

Make sure the Bing bot (bingbot / adidxbot) isn't blocked in robots.txt so it can verify price and availability

4

Fix the automatic feed schedule: confirm the file URL, credentials, and that it fetches within the timeout window

5

Re-map product categories to Microsoft's taxonomy instead of relying on the imported Google values

6

Check store, currency, and market settings match the country you're targeting

How to diagnose this without guessing

Start with measurement

Check whether the conversion action you are optimizing for matches the business outcome you actually want. If the account is optimizing for page views, button clicks, low-quality leads, duplicate events, or imported conversions with delays, the platform may appear to be learning while it is really chasing the wrong signal.

Segment before you rebuild

Break the data down by campaign, ad group, creative, keyword, search term, audience, device, placement, geography, and time of day. Averages hide problems. One weak segment can make the whole account look broken even when part of the setup is working well.

Check intent and message match

Look at what people expected when they clicked and what the landing page gave them next. Strong ads can still fail if the page changes the promise, asks for too much commitment too early, loads slowly, or gives visitors no clear next step.

Change in a controlled order

Fix tracking first, then remove waste, then improve relevance, then test new offers and creative. This order matters because better creative or bidding cannot compensate for broken data or traffic that should have been excluded in the first place.

⚡ Quick Wins — Do These First

Run Microsoft Merchant Center diagnostics separately from Google — never assume import parity
Confirm bingbot / adidxbot is allowed in robots.txt
Re-submit the feed manually after fixing errors instead of waiting for the next scheduled fetch
Verify sale prices and availability match what the page shows to the Bing crawler

When to stop tweaking and get help

If you have already tried the quick wins and the account still shows bing feed errors, the issue is probably not a single checkbox. At that point it is worth reviewing the campaign from the outside: what the offer promises, who sees it, what search terms or audiences are driving spend, what the landing page asks visitors to do, and which conversion action tells the platform what success looks like.

Bring screenshots, recent changes, search term reports, landing page URLs, tracking notes, and any sales or lead-quality feedback you have. The more context you bring, the faster we can find whether the problem is in the account settings, the creative, the funnel, or the measurement layer.

Related fixes

Still struggling? Let's fix it together.

Book a 1:1 session and we'll diagnose and resolve your bing feed errors in real time.

Book a session ($199)
Live cohortFunnel Forge — build your entire marketing funnel in 4 live sessions. 4 seats left in the final cohort. Save your seat