With so many changes coming to Google Shopping and Google Surfaces in the coming year, it’s crucial to know more about the new tools and services Google is providing to help sellers and manufacturers to plan their marketing campaigns. In combination with your feed management software, Google's tools can help you create better-informed and winning product marketing strategies.
The price competitiveness report will help retailers benchmark the products they are selling or the items they are planning to sell which will give them an advantage in their pricing strategy.
How does the price competitiveness report work?
The report pulls data from real activity on Google and shows an average price for each product. You can then set your campaign budgets according to the pricing that your competitors are getting clicks. The reports pull recent data as well as aggregated data over longer periods of time which will give you an edge for seasonal campaigns.
Two ways to segment data in the reports:
- View data by category, brand, or product type and see how competitive your products are in Shopping ads and free listings in the Shopping tab).
- View data by product and benchmark any products for which Google has data.
You will find the report in your Google Merchant Center account.
- Log into the Merchant Center
- Enable Market Insights
- Click on the “Growth” tab
- Click Price competitiveness.
The benefits of Google’s new price competition report
- Inform your product marketing campaigns with real insights into pricing and sales
- Adapt your bids to the current market trends on those products. Bid competitively on new products or item ranges you are launching and have uploaded to the Google Merchant Account.
- Create a smart pricing strategy for all of your product ranges by benchmarking against your competitors or seeing how certain products are performing in new markets.
Report metric 1: View by category, brand, or product type
Above, at, or below benchmark
This denotes the percentage of instances when your products were ranked against other products – where yours were 1% above, within +/- 1% of, or 1% below the benchmark price.
No benchmark
The percentage of instances in which your products were ranked against other products and there wasn’t enough data to calculate the benchmark price for a specific product.
Report metric 2: Viewing by product
Your Price
Shows the current price for an item, as defined by the price [price] attribute or, if it’s available/active, the sale price [sale_price] attribute.
Current benchmark price
This is the average click-weighted price for a product across all retailers that list that same product on Shopping ads and free listings. Products are matched using their GTIN. The benchmark price pulls data from 1 – 7 days prior to the report request. Benchmarks are weighted by clicks which means that more popular offers receive more weight in the benchmark price.
Current benchmark price difference
This metric is the percentage difference between a current price and the current click-weighted average benchmark price for one of your products.
Historical benchmark price difference
This denotes the average percentage difference between a price and the benchmark price for the selected date range.