Benchmarks
What 3,170 Shopify catalogs look like from the outside
We read the public product catalogs of 3,170 Shopify stores that run Google Ads and counted a few things in each. The numbers say how many stores had at least one product with each problem. Counted 2 October 2026.
What Google and Meta act on
| Finding | Stores | Share | In a typical affected store |
|---|---|---|---|
| A product with no image | 965 | 30.4% | 0.5% of products |
| A product with no description, or one under 30 characters | 1,964 | 62.0% | 2.4% of products |
Google and Meta won’t list a product with no image. A missing description gets a warning from Google and may keep a product out of Meta’s catalog. Thirty characters is our own line for “too short to say anything”, not Google’s.
Things we counted but don’t call errors
These turned up often. We have not found a Google or Meta rule that rejects a product for them, so read them as housekeeping, not as disapprovals.
| Finding | Stores | Share | In a typical affected store |
|---|---|---|---|
| A variant priced above its compare-at price | 1,313 | 41.4% | 0.8% of products |
| A variant priced at zero on a product that is otherwise for sale | 204 | 6.4% | 0.2% of products |
| A product with no product type | 2,426 | 76.5% | 10.0% of products |
| A product with no SKU on any variant | 2,014 | 63.5% | 2.8% of products |
| Two products with the same title | 1,730 | 54.6% | 1.3% of products |
What can’t be seen from outside
Barcodes and product categories are not in a store’s public catalog. Brand can’t be measured either: where a product has no vendor, Shopify shows the store’s name. Those three are checked after the app is installed.
How we counted
- The source is each store’s public product list, the file any browser can open at
/products.json. Nothing comes from a store’s admin. - A store is in the count if its home page carried a Google Ads conversion tag when we looked. That is our sign that it runs Google Ads. It does not tell us whether the store runs Shopping campaigns.
- Stores were read between 7 September and 2 October 2026. Each store counts once, by its latest complete read.
- We read up to 15,000 products per store. 327 stores have more than that, and for them the counts cover the first 15,000.
- Records with no variant priced above zero are left out. They are usually option boxes, fees or layout items, not products. A record with no image that is clearly not a product is not counted as a product with no image.
- Each product counts once per finding, however many variants it has.
- The median store in the count has about 390 products. A quarter have fewer than about 100, and a quarter have more than about 1,800.
- “In a typical affected store” is the median share of the catalog among the stores that had the problem at all.
- This is not a random sample of Shopify stores. It is the ad-running stores we could find and read, so the shares describe that group and no other.
Check your own store
The free check reads your public catalog the same way and counts the first two findings.
Feedwatch scan of public storefront catalogs · October 2026