Google Merchant Center Launches New Price Competitiveness Insights

New Google Merchant Tools Allows Advertisers to Better Compare Pricing Among Competitors

With so much uncertainty during this unprecedented time, Google Merchant Centre has given us a small treat to tide us over in the form of Price Competitiveness Insights. These insights, which can now be found under the Growth > Price Competitiveness tab in the Google Merchant Centre, will help advertisers better understand how their pricing compares to competitors. The dashboard does this by providing a visual summary of your price competitiveness along with options that allow you to narrow down by product type, brand, category, and product.

Wait, Haven’t We Seen This Before?

You might be wondering, how is this any different from the price benchmarking data you’ve seen before in Google Ads? After all, comparative pricing isn’t exactly a new or revolutionary concept for Google. While advertisers can see how their product pricing compares to competitors using Google ads, there are some key differences and additional benefits to using the new Merchant Center tool that we will dive into below.

Easy to Use

This new tool is both highly interactive and easy to use and allows users to focus in on particular pricing trends and analyze any changes that are driving this change in price competitiveness.

Allows You to Map Trends Over Time

Another great feature is the ability to capture various snapshots in time by looking at illustrations of day-to-day trends using the date filter.

Access to More Comparable Data

The price competitiveness report offers price comparisons using Global Trade Item Numbers (GTIN) to give you a better look at the different prices across various sellers. This is different from Google Ads benchmarking data which includes pricing for all Stock Keeping Units (SKU) that often skews data sets.

Create Thorough Summaries

With the Merchant Center tool, users have access to more meaningful summaries for each segment compared to Google Ads benchmarking data, which only offers the product price and benchmark product price at whatever level they’ve segmented. Users will get to what percentage of their products in a given segment are above, at, or below the benchmark price along with the percentage of products that have no benchmark at all. Users can even narrow down which products fall into each of those buckets. As you can see, this new tool is great news for advertisers, as it provides a bit of clarity regarding the SERP dynamics that sway performance and how they fluctuate over time. Now the question is – will you be taking advantage of these new insights.