Overview

The Search Engine Marketing (SEM) item diagnostics APIs help sellers identify and resolve issues that affect items in active SEM campaigns and their ability to be advertised through external channels such as Google. Items may be blocked or limited due to issues such as content or image quality problems, pricing inconsistencies, and policy violations. These APIs provide item-level diagnostics, issue metadata, and remediation guidance to help sellers identify blocked or limited items and take corrective action.

Use cases

Use these APIs to:

Identify items that are blocked or limited items from serving
Retrieve issue metadata and remediation steps for each item
Surface actionable fixes in partner dashboards
Monitor campaign item health over time
Build seller-facing remediation workflows
Automate diagnostics reporting at scale
Integrate diagnostics data into analytics, attribution, or Business Intelligence (BI) pipelines

Prerequisites

Before using these APIs, ensure that:

You have seller or approved Solution Provider access to Walmart Marketplace APIs
You have obtained OAuth access tokens
Your seller account has SEM campaign access enabled

Recommended integration workflow

The SEM diagnostics APIs are designed to work together as a diagnostic workflow.

Step 1: Retrieve issue metadata during initialization

Call the Get issue types endpoint during application startup and cache the response locally.

Refresh cached issue metadata every 24 hours.

Step 2: Retrieve diagnostics periodically

Use the Search item issues endpoint to monitor campaign item health and identify blocked or limited items.

Recommended polling frequency depends on catalog size and operational requirements.

Step 3: Surface remediation guidance

Map issue types returned by diagnostics responses to cached issue metadata.

Use:

issueDescription
issueCategory
isFixable
and learnMoreUrl

Key data considerations

Diagnostics currently apply only to items associated with active SEM campaigns.
By default, responses return only items with issues (BLOCKED or LIMITED).
Healthy items are returned only when explicitly requested using the issueCategory=NO_ISSUES filter.
Issue metadata should be cached locally to reduce repeated metadata retrieval calls.

Item diagnostics