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Card class: Hero • Category: Ad Platform

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At a glance

Cross-channel alert for spend on a Microsoft Shopping campaign whose product feed has live rejections. When offers in a feed are disapproved, the campaign serves fewer products with a degraded bid signal, so every pound you spend competes on a thinner, weaker catalogue. The card joins your Microsoft Shopping spend against the rejection status of the linked feed, including feeds managed through a feed tool such as Feedonomics, so you can see the cost of leaving rejections unfixed. The fix is to clear the rejections, after which the full catalogue serves and the bid signal recovers.
What it countsMicrosoft Shopping spend on campaigns whose linked product feed currently has active rejected or disapproved offers.
How the join worksEach Shopping campaign is mapped to its source feed, and the feed’s current rejection state is checked against live spend. Spend running while rejections are open is the flagged amount.
Why it is cross-channelThe Microsoft campaign report shows spend; the feed tool shows rejections. Neither alone tells you that you are spending into a degraded catalogue.
What a rejection isAn offer disapproved by Microsoft Merchant Center for a policy, data, or quality reason, so it cannot serve until fixed.
Cost basisGross Microsoft Shopping media cost, post Click Quality filter.
CurrencyAccount currency.
Why the bid signal degradesSmart Shopping and similar strategies optimise across the live catalogue. Rejected offers remove inventory and skew the optimisation toward whatever still serves, often the wrong products.
Time window30-day rolling spend, evaluated against current feed rejection status.
Alert triggerAny spend on a Shopping campaign whose linked feed has live rejections.
Rolesowner, marketing, operations

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Calculation

Calculated automatically from your Microsoft Ads (Bing) Shopping data joined to your product feed’s rejection status. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.

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Worked example

A UK outdoor-gear brand runs three Microsoft Shopping campaigns fed by a Feedonomics catalogue. The card reads on 16 Jun 26, trailing 30 days.
CampaignLinked feedOffers totalOffers rejected30-day spendFlagged?
Shopping - Core rangeMain feed1,8000£4,200No
Shopping - FootwearFootwear feed620140 (GTIN errors)£2,100Yes
Shopping - ClearanceClearance feed41038 (price mismatch)£640Yes
The card flags £2,740 of spend running against feeds with open rejections. Reading it:
  1. The footwear feed is the urgent one. With 140 of 620 offers rejected, nearly a quarter of the catalogue is dark, yet the campaign still spent £2,100. That budget concentrated on the offers that survived, which are not necessarily the best sellers.
  2. GTIN errors are a fixable, high-impact rejection type. Missing or invalid product identifiers are a common Feedonomics-stage fix; once corrected and re-reviewed, the rejected offers return and the campaign serves the full range again.
  3. The clearance price mismatch is a classic feed-vs-store drift. The feed price and the landing-page price disagree, so Microsoft disapproves the offer to protect shoppers. Sync the feed to live pricing and the rejections clear.
  4. The bid signal is degraded, not just the coverage. Because Smart Shopping optimises across whatever serves, a quarter of the footwear catalogue being dark means the algorithm has been learning on a skewed subset. Expect a short re-stabilisation once the rejections clear.
The recoverable value here is twofold: the spend stops being wasted on a thin catalogue, and the campaign’s optimisation gets the full product set back. Feed rejections are one of the highest-leverage Shopping fixes because clearing them restores both coverage and signal at once.

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Sibling cards merchants should reference together

CardWhy pair it with Spend on Campaigns with Active Feed Rejections
Active Shopping Ads on Out-of-Stock SKUsThe other feed-health leak. Rejections remove offers; stockouts make served offers unbuyable. Check both together.
Microsoft Ads Spend by CampaignShows the absolute spend on each Shopping campaign so you can prioritise the biggest degraded one.
Microsoft Ads ROAS by CampaignA campaign with heavy rejections often shows depressed ROAS; clearing rejections should lift it.
Microsoft Ads Impression ShareRejected offers cannot win impressions, so impression share falls. Recovery here confirms the fix landed.
Microsoft Ads Wasted SpendThe account-wide waste view; feed-rejection spend is a structural slice of it.

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Reconciling against Microsoft Advertising

Where to look in Microsoft Advertising: Microsoft Merchant Center → Catalogs, where the offer status column lists approved, pending, and disapproved offers with the rejection reason. Cross-reference the disapproved count against the Shopping campaign spend under Microsoft Advertising → Campaigns. The campaign keeps spending on its approved offers even while others are rejected. Why Microsoft cannot show this on its own:
  • Merchant Center shows rejection status; the campaign report shows spend; the two are not joined into a single “spend at risk” figure inside the Microsoft UI.
  • When the feed is managed by a tool such as Feedonomics, the rejection often originates upstream and is best fixed there, but Microsoft only shows the downstream disapproval.
Why our number may legitimately differ from a manual check:
ReasonDirection of divergence
Re-review timing. After a fix, Microsoft re-reviews offers on its own schedule, so a cleared rejection may still show briefly.Ours may flag slightly longer or shorter than the UI
Pending vs rejected. Pending offers are not yet rejected; the card focuses on active rejections.Counts may differ from a raw Merchant Center total
Feed-cycle lag. An upstream fix in the feed tool takes a cycle to reach Microsoft.Ours reflects the joined state, which can lead or lag the UI
Cross-connector reconciliation:
CardExpected relationshipWhat causes legitimate divergence
shopify.total_revenueRejected offers cannot drive commerce revenue; clearing them should lift Shopping-attributed salesSeasonality and stock can move revenue independently of the feed fix.
google_ads.gads_wasted_spendThe same feed usually powers Google Shopping, so rejections often appear on both platformsGoogle and Microsoft apply slightly different feed policies, so the rejected sets are not identical.

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Known limitations / merchant FAQs

My campaign is still spending, so are the rejections really a problem? Yes. The campaign spends on whatever offers survived review, but a meaningful share of your catalogue is dark, so the budget concentrates on a subset that may not be your best sellers. Worse, Smart Shopping optimises across the live catalogue, so a quarter of your products being rejected skews the algorithm’s learning. You are spending fully into a partially broken catalogue. The rejections are managed in Feedonomics, not Microsoft. Where do I fix them? Usually upstream in the feed tool, because that is where the offer data is assembled. Common fixes are correcting GTINs and product identifiers, aligning feed prices with live store prices, and supplying required attributes. Once corrected, the feed pushes to Microsoft and the offers re-review. Microsoft only shows the downstream disapproval, so fixing it in the Microsoft UI alone often does not stick. How fast do offers come back after I fix a rejection? After the corrected feed reaches Microsoft, offers re-review on Microsoft’s schedule rather than instantly. Expect a short delay, then the offers return to serving. Because Smart Shopping was optimising on a reduced catalogue, allow a brief re-stabilisation period once the full range is live again. Why does ROAS sometimes dip right after I fix the rejections? Because the campaign suddenly has its full catalogue back and the bidding algorithm has to relearn across the restored offers. This is a short, expected adjustment, not a sign the fix was wrong. ROAS should recover and usually improve once optimisation re-stabilises on the complete product set. Are all rejection types equally urgent? No. Identifier errors such as missing GTINs and price mismatches against the landing page are high-impact and usually quick to fix, so they are top priority. Policy rejections may need a product or content change and take longer. Sort by spend and rejection share to fix the costliest, most-fixable feeds first. The same rejections appear on Google Shopping. Is that the same issue? Almost always, because both platforms typically read the same source feed. The exact rejected set can differ because Google and Microsoft apply slightly different policies, but the root cause, the feed data, is shared. Fix it once at the feed level and both platforms benefit.

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Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

Spend on Campaigns with Active Feed Rejections is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across Microsoft Ads (Bing) and 70+ other ecommerce connectors. Nerve Centre runs the detection layer; Vortex Mind investigates the cause when something moves; Ask Viq lets you interrogate any number in plain English. Start for free or book a demo to see this metric running on your own data.