How to advertise refurbished products with Google Shopping ads

In this article, we’ll walk you through the fundamentals of advertising refurbished products with Shopping Ads, starting with what qualifies as refurbished and moving through how to set up your feed the right way.

Refurbished products are becoming a popular choice for online shoppers, especially in tech categories like phones and laptops. They offer the same quality as new items but at a lower price, making them an attractive option for shoppers. For retailers, this means a growing opportunity to meet customer demand and reach more customers. However, when it comes to promoting these products through Google Shopping ads, there are specific feed setups and best practices that need to be followed, which we’ll cover in this guide.

What are refurbished products

According to Google’s guidelines, a refurbished product should:

• Be professionally restored to full working order, either by the manufacturer or a certified third party.
  
• Include a warranty, even if limited.
  
• Function like new, but may or may not come in original packaging.

These products appeal to consumers not only for their environmental benefits, but especially for their cost savings, with price being one of the main reasons people choose refurbished over new.

Expanding into refurbished offerings through Shopping Ads allows retailers to meet customer demand, capture new audiences, and boost overall growth. However, setting up refurbished product ads requires attention to specific feed configurations and best practices.

Five best practices for advertising refurbished products

1. Use the correct condition attribute

Make sure to set the condition attribute in your feed explicitly to “refurbished.” This helps Google (and your potential customers) clearly understand the condition of the product they’re viewing.

If this isn’t set correctly, your product could get disapproved, users might be confused about what they’re buying, and it could negatively impact your campaign performance and account health.

2. Assign unique product IDs

Google recommends assigning a unique item ID for each product condition. This means that a refurbished version of a product should not share the same ID as its new equivalent.

Reusing item IDs is discouraged for several reasons:

• Google’s systems rely on the item ID to recognize and understand the product. Reusing the same ID across conditions can confuse this logic, leading to misclassification or mismatched data.

• The item ID stores historical performance data, including user interest, click-through rates, and conversion behavior. Changing the product behind the ID (e.g. from new to refurbished) erases the context of that data and can negatively affect optimization and targeting.

• Misaligned IDs can result in the wrong audiences being targeted. For example, users interested in new products being served refurbished listings, or vice versa, which can reduce relevance.

For refurbished products, it’s best to treat each version, even different grades like “As New” or “Good Condition”, as a separate offer. By assigning unique IDs, you ensure cleaner tracking, clearer reporting, and more stable campaign performance. This simple step can help you avoid a lot of unnecessary confusion, both for Google and for your own analysis.

3. Communicate clearly with titles and images

Transparency drives trust, both with users and Google. 

• Your product titles should clearly indicate that a product is refurbished. This is the most important signal to both Google and potential buyers, and leaving it out can lead to disapprovals or poor user experience. To maintain relevance, make sure the most important attributes or keywords appear first in the title, followed by the term “refurbished”.
• Images, however, fall into more of a gray area. Ideally, they should differ from those used for brand-new versions. For example, by showing neutral backgrounds or refurbished packaging. That said, in categories like tech, it’s often difficult to visually represent that an item is refurbished. In such cases, Google may be more flexible, as long as the title and condition attribute are accurate, and the ad doesn’t mislead the shopper. 

In general, always put yourself in the shopper’s shoes: if someone is searching for a new product, don’t risk disappointing them by showing an ad that leads to a refurbished item instead.

4. Align the landing page

When someone clicks on a Shopping ad for a refurbished product, the landing page should clearly reflect that offer, with no confusion or ambiguity.

The landing page should:

• Clearly label the product as refurbished
  
• Display the correct price and condition
  
• Provide warranty information or other details to confirm the customer’s expectation
  

Avoid sending users to generic product pages that mix new and refurbished options or don’t clearly explain the offer. For example, don’t promote a low refurbished price in your ad and then direct users to a page showing a full-price new product.
This kind of mismatch between ad and landing page is one of the most common causes of Merchant Center disapprovals, and a main reason why shoppers abandon their purchase before checkout.

5. Manage pricing and inventory fluctuations

Refurbished inventory is often more dynamic than new products. Stock tends to be more limited, and pricing can vary depending on condition grades such as “As New”, “Lightly Used”, or “Visibly Used”. This makes consistency between your product feed and website more challenging but also more important.

To avoid potential issues:

• Ensure your product feed updates frequently, especially for price and stock changes.
  
• Use structured data (schema markup) to support Google’s automatic item updates, but only if your implementation is accurate. Incomplete or incorrect markup can lead to mismatches in price or condition, especially when multiple variants are listed on the same page.
  
• Assign unique URLs and item IDs for each refurbishment grade to reduce confusion and allow for more precise control.

Because stock for refurbished items can sell out quickly, even small delays between feed updates and site changes can lead to disapprovals or poor user experience. While Google’s automatic updates can help, they’re only effective if your structured data is implemented correctly.

Common pitfalls to watch out for

Rolling out refurbished products into your Shopping campaigns introduces potential challenges:

• Feed disapprovals due to missing or incorrect attributes. Forgetting to set the condition to refurbished, or having mismatches between product data and landing pages, can quickly trigger policy violations.
• Performance instability when introducing a large number of new item variants. Google’s systems need time to learn and optimize around these new listings, so initial performance may fluctuate.
• Availability and pricing mismatches, especially when working with multiple refurbishment vendors or product grades. These mismatches can trigger vague Merchant Center warnings like “price mismatch” or “availability mismatch,” which don’t always pinpoint the exact issue, making troubleshooting time-consuming.
• Ambiguous diagnostics, where a refurbished variant is flagged but the warning is generic. This often requires time-consuming trial and error to find and resolve the issue.

To reduce risk, we recommend starting with a smaller, well-structured batch of refurbished products. Test performance and stability carefully before scaling up.

To conclude, advertising refurbished products on Google requires close attention to Google’s policies and following proven best practices. By properly structuring your product feed, using clear and accurate titles and visuals, aligning landing pages, and maintaining data accuracy, you not only stay compliant with Google’s policies, you also build trust with potential customers.

At Producthero, we support merchants with tools and expertise to improve Shopping campaign performance. Whether it’s solving Merchant Center issues or helping you grow visibility and conversions, we’re here to help you get the most out of your campaigns.