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Blog / How one cent makes all the difference: why Google’s price monitoring in merchant centre is a valuable feature for PPC managers

For businesses operating in the e-commerce space, the release of Google’s price monitoring feature inside the Merchant Centre (GMC) has come as a welcome addition to campaign management.

 

Florian Tomko, Senior PPC Manager at Somebody Digital, highlights that this feature has been a long time coming; “Google has been testing this for some time, having given some accounts access around a year ago.” But, as he notes, it remains a game changer, especially for those working in paid campaigns or e-commerce.

How it works:

The price monitoring feature essentially allows a business to benchmark its products against competitors, enabling organisations to gauge whether they are above or below the average threshold for their industry.

 

“The main takeaway for me is that businesses and agencies need to act on the information that is now available,” says Florian.

The report typically is updated on a rolling 7-day basis, so marketers can make timely decisions to update product prices, raising or lowering them to meet the benchmark indicated by Google. This could also attract more clicks to the product listing in order to generate sales efficiently.

Doing things differently

While the update is a new nice-to-have, the paid media professionals at Somebody Digital have been offering this service to PPC clients for some time already, notes Cristiano Winckler, Director of Digital Operations at the agency.

 

“The fact is, at Somebody Digital, we’ve been using third-party tools to monitor competitor prices for a long time,” he notes. “If your agency has only started doing it now with the Google update, they probably haven’t been running your PPC campaigns very efficiently.”

 

The reason for this, as both Cristiano and Florian point out, is that even one cent can impact your click-through rate. Florian flags that “If everyone is showing the same product with the same image and similar copy, what will be your differentiating factor? Your price point.”

 

“We really see ourselves as part of our client’s team, that’s why we’ve been monitoring and advising them on price competitiveness as part of our PPC services,” adds Cristiano. “If the price is too high and we’re losing clicks, we advise the client to consider lowering the price. It allows our clients to be more competitive and can ultimately result in higher conversion rates and a more successful PPC campaign.”

Google giveth and Google taketh away.

While the update is a welcome one, Florian notes that it’s a new lever to pull in the PPC management box, which the search engine Megalith constantly revises.

 

“Google in the last few years has taken a lot of control away from us. The search engine has hidden search terms In PMAX campaigns, for example.” He says this can sometimes make advertising on the platform a bit of a black box. “You don’t really know where the ads are serving. So, on the one hand, they take away a lot of stuff that we could control previously. But now, by giving us that price competitiveness report it can help us to optimise the campaigns and then advise our clients on price.”

Cristiano agrees, “Look, this update is super helpful, but as a business, if your agency wasn’t previously monitoring competition prices and advising you on benchmark figures, chances are that your e-commerce campaigns were not fully optimised, and you were likely overspending, and maybe seeing a lower click-through rate.”

 

Optimising PPC campaigns is something the experts at Somebody Digital do excellently. Get in touch today, and let’s talk about how we can take your e-commerce efforts to the next level.

 

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