Quick one for anyone running Google Shopping. When a product underperforms, the reflex is to raise the bid. But a lot of soft Shopping performance is not a budget problem at all. It is a filing problem. Every product in your feed carries a google_product_category. This is the shelf Google decides you compete on. Two things go wrong: 1. The field is blank, so Google guesses the shelf for you. 2. The field is too broad, so an outdoor light ends up judged against garden furniture rather than other lights. Either way the product still appears on your store and in Shopping, so you never see the missing impressions. You just feel the softer sales and blame the algorithm. How to check it yourself: Pull your product feed and look at the category assigned to each item. Flag anything blank or obviously too broad. Then map it to the most specific correct node in Google's product taxonomy before you touch a single bid. I wrote up a read-only way to find these across a whole catalogue, plus the seven other silent failure modes that quietly drop GMC listings. Happy to share where it lives in the comments if useful. What is the strangest category Google auto-assigned one of your products? Drop it below.