Google Merchant Center price competitiveness and best sellers reports
How to use Merchant Center's price competitiveness and best sellers reports, benchmark prices, reading the data properly, and picking which products to push.
Merchant Center will tell you, product by product, how your price compares to what other merchants charge for the same item, and which products are the most popular on Google right now. Together the price competitiveness and best sellers reports answer the question every Shopping budget decision hangs on: which products are worth pushing, which are priced out of the auction, and where a small price move would buy disproportionate traffic.
Two reports, one question
Buried in Merchant Center's insights section are two of the most commercially useful datasets Google gives merchants for free:
- Price competitiveness: for each of your products Google can match to the wider market, how your price compares to a benchmark built from other merchants' prices for the same product.
- Best sellers (the most popular products and brands on Shopping, per category and country, with demand ranking and typical price ranges) regardless of whether you stock them.
Separately they're interesting. Together they answer the allocation question: of everything in the catalogue, which products deserve budget, which need a price decision first, and which aren't worth pushing at all? Most merchants spread Shopping spend evenly across the feed and let the auction sort it out; these reports are how you stop doing that.
How the benchmark price works
For every product it can confidently identify across merchants, Google computes a benchmark: a click-weighted average price for that exact product in your country. Click-weighting matters: it isn't the average of every listed price, it's the average weighted towards where shoppers actually clicked, so it reflects the price the market is really transacting attention at, not the fantasy price of a listing nobody sees.
Your report then shows, per product: your price, the benchmark, and the gap. Three practical readings:
| Your position | What it means in the auction | Sensible responses |
|---|---|---|
| Meaningfully below benchmark | You're leaving margin on the table, or you've a genuine edge worth amplifying | Push these: raise bids/visibility while the advantage holds; check margin survives |
| Around benchmark | Price is neutral; other factors (ratings, image, title) decide your CTR | Compete on listing quality: see product ratings |
| Meaningfully above benchmark | Every impression fights uphill; CTR and conversion both suffer | Reprice, reduce bids to protect margin, or justify the premium: don't just spend harder |
| No benchmark | Google can't match the product to the market | Check identifiers first; if genuinely unique, benchmarks don't apply |
That last row is a data-quality signal hiding in a pricing report. Benchmarks depend on product matching, and matching runs on identifiers: a catalogue where half the products show no benchmark usually has a GTIN coverage problem, not a uniqueness story. See GTIN issues; fixing identifiers literally makes market data appear.
Reading the best sellers report
Best sellers ranks the most popular products and brands on Shopping by category and country, with relative demand (a rank and popularity band rather than raw volumes) and the price range they sell in. It includes an inventory flag (whether you stock each item) which turns it into three tools:
- A push list. Products you stock that rank high in demand are where visibility buys the most traffic. High demand plus a competitive price position is the strongest push signal the two reports can jointly produce.
- A ranging list. High-demand products you don't stock are assortment gaps with quantified demand behind them: genuinely useful input for buying decisions, straight from the channel you'd sell them on.
- A pricing reality check. The price range on each best seller shows where the market clusters. Stocking a top-20 product but sitting outside its cluster explains a lot of "why doesn't this product get impressions" mysteries before you ever open a bidding tool: and it's a check worth running before diagnosing deeper causes in impression drops.
Using the reports to pick which products to push
The workable loop, run monthly (weekly in Q4):
- Cross the two datasets. For each product: demand rank (best sellers) and price position (competitiveness). You're building a 2×2: high/low demand versus at-or-below/above benchmark.
- Push the high-demand, well-priced quadrant. These products win auctions economically: clicks convert, CTR holds, cost-per-click buys real share. They deserve the visibility budget and the aggressive targets.
- Fix or throttle the high-demand, overpriced quadrant. Demand exists but your price loses the comparison. Decide the price question first: pushing spend at an uncompetitive price buys expensive clicks that don't convert.
- Leave the low-demand tail on maintenance. Neither report says these can't sell: but they earn attention when their numbers move, not before.
This is product-level portfolio management, and doing it by hand across thousands of SKUs is exactly the kind of work that decays after the second month. BidSmart automates the loop: product-level analysis that identifies which products justify a push and which are burning spend against a losing price position, surfaced as recommendations you approve or reject before anything changes. Nothing executes without your sign-off; the reports inform, you decide.
Deep dive Why price competitiveness and bidding are one decision, not two
The most expensive mistake this data prevents is treating price and bid as separate levers owned by separate decisions. In a Shopping auction they're the same lever viewed from two sides, because the shopper sees your price on the ad tile itself.
Walk through what "above benchmark" actually does to auction economics:
- CTR falls before the click. Shopping shows tiles side by side with prices visible. A product at £54.99 against a £47 benchmark loses the click to the cheaper tile most of the time: no bid changes what the shopper can read.
- Quality signals compound the loss. Persistently weak CTR reads as low relevance, degrading your effective position over time. You end up paying more per click for worse placement: a tax on being expensive.
- Conversion falls after the click. The shopper who did click can still comparison-shop in a second tab. Above-benchmark products convert below their category norm, so the same CPC buys less revenue.
- Multiply it out. A product 15% above benchmark might see CTR down ~30% and conversion down ~20% versus its at-benchmark self. To hold volume you'd bid into that headwind: paying more per click for clicks worth less. The auction charges you three times for one pricing decision.
Now invert it: a product 8% below benchmark with healthy margin is the best bidding opportunity in the account. Every impression outperforms: the tile wins clicks at native CTR-plus, converts above norm, and the auction's feedback loops run in your favour. Underbidding these is as costly as overbidding the expensive ones; the data says push, and the push compounds.
The operational consequence: bid decisions should be made with the price position on the table. A tROAS target that treats a below-benchmark winner and an above-benchmark loser identically is averaging over the most predictive variable available. This is precisely where product-level analysis earns its keep: BidSmart evaluates performance product by product, so a price-advantaged product gets recommended the push its economics justify while an overpriced one gets flagged rather than fuelled. Every recommendation waits for your explicit approval before anything executes: the analysis is automated, the judgement stays yours, and the price question ("do we reprice or accept the position?") remains a business decision no bidding tool should make for you.
Caveats worth respecting
- Benchmarks compare identical products only. Your own-brand duvet has no benchmark because nothing matches it: absence of data isn't a licence to assume you're competitive.
- Click-weighting skews towards big sellers. In categories dominated by one large retailer's pricing, the benchmark substantially is their price. Matching it may be neither possible nor wise; know whose number you're chasing.
- The reports lag reality by a little. Flash sales and rapid repricing move faster than the data refreshes: fine for weekly allocation decisions, wrong for hour-by-hour reactions.
- Price isn't the only tile signal. Ratings, image quality and title relevance all move CTR too. A product slightly above benchmark with 4.8 stars and 900 reviews can out-click a cheaper unrated rival: read price position alongside listing strength, not instead of it. See how Shopping listings work for the full set of signals on the tile.
Frequently asked questions
What is the benchmark price in Google Merchant Center?
A traffic-weighted average of what other merchants charge for the same product in your country, computed from products Google can confidently match, which in practice means products with clean GTINs. It's the market's going rate, weighted towards where clicks actually happen.
Where do I find the price competitiveness report?
In Merchant Center under the growth/insights section (Price competitiveness). It needs market data to exist, products without solid identifiers, or in thin categories, may show no benchmark at all.
Why do some of my products have no benchmark price?
Google couldn't match them to enough identical offers from other merchants. The usual cause is a missing or wrong GTIN; the rest is genuinely unique products (own-brand, custom) where no comparable market exists.
Does being above the benchmark price mean I should cut prices?
Not automatically. It means you'll win fewer clicks at current bids and convert a lower share of the clicks you win. The right response might be a price move, a margin-aware bid reduction, or accepting the position on differentiated products, the report informs the decision, it doesn't make it.
What does the best sellers report show?
The most popular products and brands on Google Shopping in each category and country, with relative demand and price ranges, including products you don't stock, which makes it a ranging tool as much as a bidding one.