In this tutorial, Austin from Grow My Ads walks through four lesser‑known Google Merchant Center reports that provide actionable insights for e‑commerce advertisers. He first explains the Shopping Experience Scorecard, which rates a store’s shipping, return, seller, and purchasing experiences against industry averages and awards a Top Quality Store badge. Next, he reviews the Price Competitiveness report, showing how to compare a merchant’s prices to Google’s benchmark, identify SKUs that are over‑priced, and use the Price Insights tab for SKU‑level suggested price changes and projected performance lifts. He then demonstrates the Competitive Visibility report (the Merchant Center’s version of Auction Insights), highlighting metrics such as relative visibility, page overlap, and ad‑organic ratio to gauge how a merchant stacks up against rivals. Finally, he covers the Promotions Performance report, which aggregates all past promotions and displays impressions, clicks, CTR, and conversion impact, helping marketers decide which promotions to repeat. Throughout, Austin emphasizes using these hidden reports to spot operational gaps, adjust pricing, improve competitiveness, and optimize future promotional strategies, while also reminding viewers to first ensure their product feed is well‑optimized.
Chapters
Hey, this is Austin from Grow My Ads. I was just in a meeting recently where we were reviewing some product data, competitor data, and some of that actually was coming from reports inside of Merchant center that a lot of people seem to forget about or simply don't even know they exist like the client I was talking with. So that'd be a good idea. Make a quick video of my four favorite reports inside of Merchant center and how they can help you bring some further insights into your products and competitors in the space. So, so let's dive in. All right, this first report is called the Shopping Experience Scorecard. You can actually see that in the overview tab inside of Merchant Center. Or you can go down to growth and then you'll see Shopping Experience scorecard there. All right, so why is this important? Well, this actually gives you a score at least Google gives you the score. So you can see this particular client, they're a top quality store. So they get this top quality store badge here we can kind of see shipping experience, return experience, seller rating, purchasing experience. This is rated, well, rating the client, and then also rates on averages within their space comparing sort of other competitors to them and businesses. So this is a good idea. Like if you have shipping issues or return issues, you're going to see this and they're also going to ding you. So you can see we actually do have an opportunity here on our return costs. So this is something we would actually go in and figure out. All right, what, what is our return policy currently set at? What's our competitor return policies? Is there any wiggle room for us to, to make any optimizations to our, our return shipping costs compared to, you know, what we're seeing from competitors. So that could be something that we're missing out on, which, you know, those are things that a lot of people forget to even look into. So these are great little insights that you can get from these shopping experience scorecards. So you want to do as much as you can to get this top quality store store badge because that tells you you are very, very competitive and you are a high quality store in Google's eyes. All right, so the next report is called Our Price Competitiveness and that's in this growth section here still. So we're going to go there. All right, this gives us a breakdown of our pricing compared to the competitors from our shopping ads. So here I like to go review our products and usually kind of buy our clicks. And, and this will give me an idea of where our price is compared to the current benchmark price that Google has So if there's any large gaps there where maybe we're way too high compared to what's being out there, then that's areas of opportunity for us to start analyzing our product. SKUs, are these products that we should be testing lower pricing? Can we test lower pricing? What's our margin on these? So this gives us, you know, just an idea as to where we are compared to what our competitors are at. You'll notice where we're getting a lot of clicks, we are generally cheaper. But then if I see start going down and I see some, some of these reds on 13% above benchmark. So this is a CPAP machine. There's no way I'm going to compete with my competitors when I'm 13% higher on cost. So in the, you know, shopping ads, if someone is searching for that particular CPAP machine, they are going to probably see competitors who are at this 2600 price and we're at 2900. No way we're going to win the click on that. So this is an area going back to the client. Hey, why is our price high compared to or at least 13% higher compared to competitors? Is this something we can change? Can we lower the price here to match the competitors? Obviously that's going to be contingent on margin availability. Many factors, right? Not just oh yeah, we forgot to to change the price down. So this is just good insights into product data that can help really move the needle then on the ad side because you're just not going to win if your price is higher. In fact price is the number one thing. Typically we have a video that I did on shopping feed optimizations and the top needle movers. I'm going to add that to the description below. But you'll see in my, in my video price is, is mentioned and again you can do price changes sometimes you just don't always have the ability to, to make those changes. But if you can and you're high just because you're accidentally too high, then here's opportunities that can easily start getting more clicks than and sales for some of these products that are above the benchmark and pricing, you could do that for brands too in this price competitiveness report. So you'll see this red bar. Here's a particular brand that we are extremely high. So 75% of this product or this brand's products, we are above the benchmark. So huge opportunity here. You'll see we, we've got several areas of red. We discussed this with the client. This is just coming down to their agreements Right now with some of these manufacturers. And so this is not news to them, but this was news to us and actually we didn't even understand their supply and manufacturer relationships and so on these products. We're very cautious now on how much we're pushing certain things due to the fact that we do know we're too high. So here we have to figure out this little green below benchmark area and at benchmark this is where we're kind of really focusing now our attention to because this is where we can compete. When we're in the red, we just can't compete. We're not going to win the sale on on of those products. Not saying some of the conversion data would prove us wrong there, but it doesn't make sense for us to spend too much time on these products that are 75% or the 75% of products of this brand where we're too high on pricing. And so here though, this green and yellow area, these are areas of SKUs for this brand that we can optimize around. There's also you can do it by category and product type. And then there's this Price Insights tab here. This gives you sort of a SKU breakdown and again you can basically take a look at products. So here's actual individual products and then they give you suggested price changes and what the predicted impression click and conversion increase would be from that. Pretty cool stuff. Again, doesn't mean anything if you can't change your pricings. But it is good to see sort of what is going on in the marketplace without always needing to sort of search yourself on Google to see what competitors are at. Then we have competitive visibility which if I go up to marketing, sorry, performance. Here's this tab. Competitive visibility. This is like Auction Insights inside a merchant center. So I do really like this report. This is showing me in the last 28 days. Obviously you can change this time frame and country. You know we do sell in other countries as well. This is showing me sort of my top competitors where they're at, where we're at. There's relative visibility, page overlap rate, higher position and this ad organic ratio. So a lot of times I'm looking at the Auction Insight data inside of the Google Ads account. But here's just another area where you can see your competitors against you. There's also this business with highest visibility. Normally you're going to see Amazon here, you're going to see the big players, Walmart, Target, etc. This doesn't really mean too much to me. I tend to Just look at businesses with similar visibility and these are the businesses that I'm going to see also in our auction insight report. All right, last report that I really like is under marketing, then you go to your promotions. Sorry, actually let me go to performance. So it's under performance, then you go to promotions. Here you go. This is showing our promotions that we've ran and the title of those promotions and then which, which promotions have received the most clicks. It shows us a little beautiful graph here too. The reason I like this is sometimes you run a promotion or a client will run a promotion and I'll come back to them and, and tell them, hey, this promotion did nothing because it just wasn't very competitive. Then there are times where also all of a sudden you run a certain promotion and you get a massive amount of action from it and you actually do see sales increase. All right, well that's good insights to have knowing in the future, can we run another promotion like that to have potentially a similar outcome. And so this is a really cool area of reports inside a merchant center to be able to see which promotions we ran that actually moved the needle the most. Shows you impressions, clicks, click through rate on those promotions as well. And so a lot of times, you know, analysts or media buyers or even if you're running your own account, you'll put a promotion in and then you just kind of, you run it and when the promotion's done, you, you either have the promotion auto scheduled to stop and then that's it. You may try to look at the data. Oh, did we get increased conversions on those days or clicks. But it's about it. This is cool to see a collective group of all of your promotions that you've ran and just see the insights to which ones actually moved the needle for you to give you just better insight into future promotions. So there are the four favorite merchant center reports of mine that are secret or hidden or people forget about. Hopefully you find some value from that. Make sure to also check out the Google Shopping feed optimization video I did. It's about 30 minutes long, it's tons of value. There's a free cheat sheet along with that. Like I said earlier in the video, if your feed sucks, none of this matters. So make sure your feed is optimized. Check that video out and I will see you on the next video. Thanks.
