Google Shopping Benchmark Price Metrics

Google has recently introduced three new metrics for its shopping campaigns. These metrics aim to show how your pricing compares to other advertisers for comparable products. We’ve found these metrics are incredibly useful and will really help you fine-tune your shopping and wider direct response marketing campaigns! This article explains what they are, how to access them and their potential uses.

What are benchmark pricing metrics and how do I view them?

Price benchmarks show, on average, how other merchants are pricing the same products that you sell. There are three metrics:

• Average product price: This is the average price of a product when your ad showed or when your ad was competitive in an auction.

• Benchmark product price: This is the average click-weighted price for a product across all merchants who advertise that product using Shopping ads.

• Benchmark Product Price Difference: This is the percentage difference between your product’s average product price and the associated benchmark product price. For product groups, the price difference is weighted based on your product’s traffic potential. More popular products will be weighted more than less popular products.

(Source: Google, 2019)

This data can be viewed once you’ve clicked on a Google Shopping campaign. Then you just need to navigate to the Products section on the left-hand navigation. Finally, add the columns by selecting the columns from the custom columns menu on the righthand side of the interface.

Where To Find Benchmark Metrics

How do I use this data?

Google outlines there are four primary uses of the data. These are:

1. Bidding: Identify products that are price competitive and adjust your bids accordingly. Or, bid down on less price-competitive products. Combine strategies by pricing attractively and raising bids for popular products.

2. Diagnostics: Understand changes in performance caused by pricing alteration or changes in the competitive environment.

3. Assortment: Inform assortment decisions by understanding the demand for different price points.

4. Pricing: Understand how your price compares to other merchants to drive pricing decisions.

(Source: Google, 2019).

We think the scope of use for this data could be much broader. For example, why stop at bidding for your Shopping campaigns? Surely understanding which products you’re competitively priced for should be considered as part of your wider paid search bidding strategy?

Then there are wider channel uses; Could this data influence which creative you use for Facebook Ad campaigns, for example? Is your price competitiveness impacting your wider channel performance (e.g. paid social, organic search, direct traffic etc.)? These are just a small number of broader potential uses for this data.

Bear in mind this will only show data for merchants in the same Google Shopping auctions as you so it should not be a substitute for keeping an eye on competitor pricing!

Concluding Thoughts

As useful as this data is, price is only one of the four P’s of marketing (or seven P’s depending on which framework you use). Whilst price is undoubtedly important, other factors such as brand recognition, delivery options, checkout experience and seller reviews – to name but a few variables – will have a huge impact on your campaign performance. This means it’s not as simple as “we have the lowest price so why aren’t our shopper ads converting?!”

But there is no doubt this data has several uses as highlighted earlier. These metrics are also in beta so we can expect improvements as Google develops its benchmark reporting.

Hopefully this article has been of use to you and thanks for reading it! If you’d like to discuss anything to do with Google Ads and how to get the most out of it, then please feel free to get in touch.

Josh Colbeck

Head of Biddable

Email: josh.colbeck@blueclaw.co.uk