Fresh price and stock data keeps your products approved and your ad spend working — out-of-date values lead to disapprovals and wasted budget. Renable re-imports your feed automatically on a regular schedule, so changes upstream flow through to your ads on their own. For stock that moves fast, join a live stock feed so availability stays current.
Why feed freshness matters#
Your ads are only as accurate as your feed. When a product's price changes on your website but your feed still carries the old number, or a product sells out while your feed still says it's available, the ad network acts on that mismatch:
- Disapprovals for mismatched data. Ad networks compare the price and availability in your feed against your live product page and can disapprove products when the two don't agree. [VERIFY: exact external policy names — e.g. Google Merchant Center's price / availability "mismatch" checks]
- Wasted spend on products that can't convert. A product that's sold out in reality but still marked available in your feed can keep serving ads that send shoppers to a dead end — you pay for clicks that can't turn into sales.
- Products quietly dropped. An out-of-stock product usually stops delivering rather than throwing a visible error, so it disappears from your ads without an obvious warning.
Keeping your feed current is the single cheapest way to avoid all three.
Renable re-imports your feed automatically#
You don't have to re-upload or re-fetch anything to stay current — as long as your source is a feed URL or a published Google Sheet. Renable re-imports your product feed every hour, checks it for changes such as new products, price changes, updated stock, and edited descriptions, and processes only what changed. Affected channels are then regenerated, so the price and availability in your live feeds stay in step with your source.
The exception is an uploaded file. If your product feed is a file you uploaded rather than a URL or a Google Sheet, Renable can't re-fetch it — there's nowhere to fetch it from. An uploaded file only ever changes when you replace it, so its products, prices and stock stay frozen at whatever was in the file until you upload a new one. The hourly import still runs, but it re-reads the same file. If your products change often, a feed URL or a Google Sheet keeps itself current where an uploaded file can't.
By default Renable picks the time within each hour automatically. If your shop regenerates its feed at a known time — say a stock export that finishes at 25 past — set Import time in the catalog's Product feed source dialog to a specific minute (in 5-minute steps), and each hourly import will start close to that time so it always picks up the freshest file. Like other feed-source changes it takes effect when you publish the catalog. Leave it on Automatic unless you have a reason to pin it.
For the cadence and what each automatic import triggers, see Questions about catalogs.
Confirm your feed is staying current#
Two places tell you at a glance that your feed is fresh:
- The health strip at the top of every catalog page shows "Last import {time ago}" and a one-line summary of what the last import changed.
- The Activity tab lists every import with its counts, so you can watch new, updated, and removed products flow through over time.
If the last import is hours older than you'd expect, or an import is failing, that's your cue to look closer. Both surfaces are covered in Feed runs, warnings, and tracing a value.
Join a live stock feed for up-to-the-minute availability#
Scheduled imports keep your catalog in sync with your main product feed. But if your stock changes faster than that feed updates, or your live availability lives in a separate warehouse or supplier system, you can join a second feed that carries real-time stock. Renable fetches auxiliary feeds at import time too, so the join always runs against the latest data from both feeds.
The mechanism is a lookup: match your products to the stock feed on a shared key — a barcode works best — and pull the availability column across into your feed. See Join a stock or supplier feed for the job, or Joining another feed with a lookup for the full mechanics.
FAQ#
How often does Renable refresh my feed?
Renable re-imports every hour and reprocesses whatever changed, then regenerates affected channels so price and availability stay current. You can pin when within the hour it runs with the Import time setting in the Product feed source dialog. Questions about catalogs covers the cadence and what each automatic import does.
Do I need to import manually to get fresh data?
No — scheduled imports handle it. If you want a refresh right now, the "Import now" button in the health strip runs one on demand. If you have unpublished edits, Import now warns you first — choosing Import anyway runs against your last published configuration (fine when you only want fresher data, not to apply those edits). With no unpublished edits, it just imports. That dialog is covered in Fixing your feed data with rules.
My price or stock changed but my ads still show the old value — why?
Two schedules sit between your website and your ad: Renable's import, which pulls your feed on its own schedule, and the ad network, which re-fetches your finished feed on its schedule. A change shows up in your ads only after both have run, so a short lag is normal. If the value never updates, it may not be mapping correctly — see Prices or stock look wrong.
Or ask Aimée#
You don't have to sit and watch an import to know it worked — ask Aimée to wait for the import to finish and report back the real counts and warnings when it's done. She can also set up a live stock join for you: add the auxiliary feed, build the lookup, test that it matches before saving, and publish once you approve.