In a continuation of our blog articles on Google Ads we now take a look at aspects of the reporting in Google Merchant Center which is used to display Shopping ads, primarily through Performance Max campaigns. We examine a couple of useful report for ecommerce advertisers: Market Insights and Price Competitiveness.
Firstly, Market Insights offers exclusive access to retail data on Google that can help inform a business’s marketing strategy. This data includes best-selling products and the most competitive product price points for the specified industry.
If a business is eligible it’ll be possible to the see the price competitiveness and best seller reports appear in the ‘Growth’ section of the main menu within Google Merchant Center, with the following benefits:
- Get benchmarks to better understand and compare your position in the retail landscape;
- Use insights to help inform business decisions, such as the product assortment and pricing strategy;
- Identify and boost efforts to sell products that already display a competitive advantage.
Next, the Price Competitiveness report shows how other retailers are pricing the same products that you sell. There’s an average price for each product, which can help to understand the price at which other retailers are successfully attracting clicks, as well as aggregate metrics on benchmark prices over time.
The report offers 2 ways to segment and view data:
– When viewing data by category, brand, or product type, it’s possible to track how competitive you are in Shopping ads and free listings over time.
– When viewing data by product, there’s information on individual products for which a benchmark metric is available.
Pricing insights should be used to help provide guidance when bidding on ads and pricing your products, with the following benefits for advertisers:
- Bid competitively. Leverage price benchmarking reporting to raise bids on your products that are price-competitive;
- Price competitively. Use price benchmark reporting as an input when making pricing decisions and setting merchandising strategy. This could include identifying products, product types, brands, or categories that are priced too high, or setting strategy for promotions or special offers.
The product view of the report only provides data for products currently submitted in your Merchant Center account and for which benchmark metrics are available. The category, brand, and product type views will take the full history of your products into consideration.
If you want to know more about how using Google Ads and these Shopping reports could help your business, please get in touch.