The “Pricing” tab shows you cards on price benchmarks and optimal sale prices. More specifically, you will find both insights around your prices relative to your competitors and sale price suggestions for products that boost clicks, conversions, and overall sales performance most effectively. This article explains which pricing information is available and how it can inform your pricing strategy to grow your business with Google.
The features covered in this article are accessible via the Merchant Center UI, as well as both the Merchant API and BigQuery integrations which may be used to generate a price history over time as only the latest prices are available at a given time.
Here are articles about Merchant Center Analytics to help you:
In this article
Benefits
If you know how your product price compares to the benchmark price for products that you and other retailers sell, you can make better decisions on how to balance the price of your products with your performance. Follow-up actions include:
- Compare the price on product and brand level: Learn if the products you’re selling are cheaper or more expensive than the benchmark price.
- Get price suggestions from Google: Leverage Google AI to get price suggestions for products with highest performance benefits.
- Understand your performance: Price plays an important role in optimizing product performance. Learn which products could benefit from a price change and how the price gap of your products relates to their performance.
How it works
To get started, navigate to the “Products” tab under “Analytics” in Merchant Center. The horizontal “Pricing” tab displays a selection of cards based on the prices you provided for your products.
You can find answers to key questions such as “How do prices for my products compare to the benchmark price?”, “How many of my products are cheaper, similar, or more expensive than the benchmark price?”, “Which of my products have the biggest price gap compared to the benchmark price?”, and “Which products benefit most from optimized sale prices to effectively boost overall sales performance?”.
To find out more information for a specific product or brand, click the View button on each card. This will open up a more advanced experience that provides in-depth information. By clicking on a product title, a side panel opens on the right side, allowing you to view more product and performance details.
What’s available?
Your prices compared to the benchmark
Get an overview on how many of your products have price comparison data available and how many of these products are cheaper or more expensive compared to benchmark price. You can click the View buttons to explore a detailed list of those products. Hovering over the price distribution graph will give you more details on the number and percentage of products with prices higher, similar or cheaper than the benchmark.
Price comparison across your brands
Learn how prices are distributed across your most popular brands with a breakdown on the percentage of products with cheaper, similar, and more expensive prices. You can click on the View button to get a full overview of your brands with price comparison data. Hovering over the price distribution graph will give you more details on the benchmark availability and comparison of your products for a selected brand.
Your products with the highest price gap
Discover which of your products have the highest price gaps between your price and the benchmark. You can click the View button to get a detailed list of all your products with higher prices compared to the benchmark price.
Sale price suggestions with highest performance impact
Sale price suggestions are based on advanced simulations and Google AI to find which products benefit most from price adjustments based on your product's ad performance and price sensitivity over the past 7 days, along with data from similar businesses.
To receive sale price suggestions you must report purchase conversions (any channel works).
Sharing additional data, such as the examples below, can enhance the quality of suggestions:
- Conversions with Cart Data
- Cost of goods (cogs) in your product data to improve the effectiveness of your cart data
- Minimum price to specify the lowest sale price limit
- Global Trade Item Numbers (GTINs) help to improve quality but are not required for sale price suggestions
Note: Google's sale price suggestions are intended to enhance performance, though they don’t guarantee future success. Price recommendations are displayed only for products with significant performance improvement. Thus, even if all eligibility criteria are satisfied, suggestions will not be provided if Google does not identify any substantial opportunities for improvement at a given time. If you are running automated discounts, sale price suggestions will no longer appear as they will be automatically applied to your opted-in products.
Explore insights beyond cards
Click the View button on each card to explore detailed information on each topic. Besides the filters like brand, category, country, product ID, price gap, or title, you can filter or sort your results based on the following dimensions:
Price benchmarks
- Your price is the current price of your product visible to customers on Google.
- Benchmark price is the average price that typically leads to more successful ad auctions, impressions, clicks, or conversions, depending on the data available. You can use benchmark prices as a guideline when deciding how to price your products competitively. The prices used to calculate a benchmark are taken from all retailers selling a product with the same GTIN in Shopping ads and organic listings.
- Price gap is the percentage difference between your price and the benchmark price for a product.
- Clicks show the number of times a consumer clicks on your product shown on Google that leads to visits to your product detail pages in the last 28 days.
- Price distribution shows how many of these products have prices higher than, similar to, or lower than their benchmark price.
Sale price suggestions
- Your price is the current price of your product visible to customers on Google.
- Suggested price is the most effective sale price predicted by Google AI. It’s based on advanced simulations at different price points over the past 7 days and factors in price elasticity, current performance, and the performance impact on price changes for businesses similar to you. Use suggested sale prices as valuable directional guidance to help shape your pricing strategy. Learn more about how to change the sale price of your products.
- Click uplift shows the predicted percentage increase of clicks from your Shopping ads if the suggested price is applied.
- Conversion uplift shows the predicted percentage increase in online conversions from Shopping ads for your product if the suggested sale price is applied.
- Effectiveness indicates which products would benefit most from applying the suggested price. This is based on the performance boost predicted by adjusting the current price to the sale price. Price suggestions with “High” effectiveness are predicted to drive the largest increase in bottom line performance compared to “Medium” or “Low” effectiveness.
Compliance to Merchant Center terms and conditions
The Pricing reports are only available for the internal use of the retailer or those acting on the retailer's behalf. Pricing data can’t be resold, publicly displayed, advertised, or aggregated across businesses. For purposes of Pricing, “retailer” means the business entity owning the domain of the products being sold or selling products on a marketplace.
You must ensure that your use, or any third party's use, of Pricing data exported from your Merchant Center account complies with the Merchant Center terms and conditions.