Tucked away in Google merchant centre lies a valuable tool our paid search specialists utilize to do price analysis on competitors, and it’s available to all. The ‘Growth’ tab is a section within Google merchant centre dedicated to finding pricing and product opportunities within your inventory. 

Here we’re given benchmark information on our price competitiveness vs our competitors and opportunities to improve your inventory range, based on recent demand. Its aggregated data taken directly from google shopping, giving us the ability to see average price breakdowns for categories, brands and individual products.

Let’s have a look in more detail how you can benefit from this tool:

Current benchmark price difference

This metric tells us, on average, how much more expensive or cheaper we are when compared to our competitors who also have ADs on google shopping. Essentially it gives us a percentile difference between our prices and our competitors.

Price More Competitively

Taking our underperforming products, we can begin reviewing them from within the price competitive report, we may identify a correlation between an overly positive current benchmark price difference i.e how much more expensive your product is vs the market, and underwhelming sales.  With this data we can begin to paint a picture as to why products aren’t performing as expected and if we’ve been pricing ourselves out of the market. 

Bidding more efficiently

Google shopping and Facebook campaigns feed optimization through campaign segmentation based on margin, price and now, price competitiveness is a big part of what we do to maximize performance. Knowing you have an advantage over your competition, in terms of price, is another opportunity to bid more competitively, increase market share and further improve ROI. 

Category best sellers

Google Merchant Centre gives you insights into monthly and weekly demand relative to both products and brands currently in and not in your current inventory. This demand  and price range data is useful for identifying trends within products, categories and reacting quickly to market changes making informed decisions. 

What are the opportunities

The two biggest opportunities within Google merchant centre growth tab are improving your pricing and maximizing your market share. From our own analysis of google shopping campaign data, we can see the impact of a below average current benchmark price and the positive impact on both AD click through rate and conversion rate. Where products were below the benchmark:

• Click through rate improved 12%
• Conversion rate improved 15%

Key takeaways

1. Ensure google merchant centre is linked with your CMS sharing inventory information.
2. Utilize the price competitiveness section along with the current benchmark price difference column to find opportunity to improve pricing performance.
3. Use the best sellers section to identify inventory gaps and opportunities as well as price ranges.