All about the price competitiveness report in Google Merchant Center

Online retailers are always looking for ways to understand their market and competitors. Knowing what your competition’s up to can help you attract more customers and dominate your industry, and help to inform your Google Shopping channel pricing strategy.

Google’s price competitiveness report on Merchant Center is a valuable tool that can help you achieve this.

What is the price competitiveness report?

Google’s price competitiveness report allows retailers to view and analyse the pricing strategies of their competitors. The report shows how other retailers are pricing the same products that you sell. This information’s helpful when trying to understand which prices are attracting the most clicks.

This report also provides aggregate metrics on benchmark prices over time. Tracking this can help you identify trends and patterns in your industry, allowing you to adjust your pricing strategies accordingly.

How does the price competitiveness report work?

This report can be segmented in two ways:

1. By category, brand, or product type. This view lets you track how competitive your prices are in Shopping ads and free listings over time, and how your pricing strategy compares to your competitors.
2. By individual products. This view gives you detailed information on individual products for which a benchmark metric is available. This includes information on average price and the number of retailers selling the product. Note that products sold by too few retailers won’t appear in the report.

The price competitiveness report can also be filtered to show a user-specified period of time, letting you identify fluctuations and trends in the market.

How do you access the report?

1. First, make sure that Market Insights are enabled in your Merchant Center account.
2. Navigate to the Growth tab in Merchant Center.
3. Click on Price competitiveness.

We all know the world of ecommerce gets more competitive by the day. Doing everything you can, such as taking advantage of the price competitiveness report, to make informed strategic decisions will help you stay competitive in your industry.

One of the key advantages of this report is that you can identify when you have a higher chance of conversion. Whilst this may have a lower impact on automated campaigns, like Performance Max, retailers using machine learning technology and SKU-level bidding can use the price competitiveness report to further reduce CPA and increase revenue.