Google Price Benchmark Report is one of the most actionable data sources available inside the Google Merchant Centre. It highlights how your product pricing compares to competitors and indicates the potential traffic uplift achievable if prices are adjusted. It's available for your popular or cross sold items and when this data is integrated directly into your product feed, it becomes a powerful lever for campaign structuring and bid management.
Feedoptimise connects to Google Merchant Center via API and automatically pulls all relevant price benchmarks. You can utilise those metrics into dynamic labels that can be fed into your Shopping setup.
Below is a breakdown of how these metrics can be utilised:
1. Labelling Products Based on Price Competitiveness
Google provides benchmark price and benchmark price ratio values for each eligible product. These allow you to categorise items by how competitively they are priced.
On top of that, Feedoptimise platform tracks these prices and their changes, enabling you to see the duration of your current competitiveness state - for instance, knowing you’ve been the cheapest, but only since yesterday.
Common labelling structures include:
a. Cheapest in the market
Using benchmark ratio, items where your price is below the market average can be flagged. Typical label logic:
- Price ratio < 0.9 → “price_cheapest”
- Price ratio < 1.0 → “price_below_market”
You can also apply duration restrictions to prevent overbidding on items that are consistently the cheapest. For example, you might choose to prioritize a product only if it has been the cheapest for less than two months.
These labels help:
- Identify products likely to convert efficiently
- Allocate higher bids or include them in more aggressive campaign tiers
- Support margin-aware strategies by combining price data with stock or profit rules
b. Not price competitive
Products priced above benchmark can be labelled to allow for more cautious spend or placement in lower-priority campaigns:
- 1.0 ≤ ratio < 1.1 → “slightly_above_market”
- ratio ≥ 1.1 → “uncompetitive_price”
This segmentation prevents overspending on products unlikely to win auctions due to price disadvantage.
2. Labelling Products by Potential Traffic Gain from Discounting
Google also estimates how much additional traffic a product could receive if its price were reduced to match market levels. These “potential traffic uplift” values enable a more tactical pricing-driven bidding strategy.
Feedoptimise can pull these uplift metrics and convert them into tiers such as:
- a. High potential uplift
- Products showing a significant increase in impression share or click volume if discounted
- Example: uplift > 50% → “high_uplift”
These can be prioritised for promotional adjustments or included in campaigns focused on revenue expansion.
- b. Moderate potential uplift
- 20% < uplift ≤ 50% → “moderate_uplift”
Useful for opportunistic discounting when margin permits.
- c. Low or negligible uplift
- uplift ≤ 20% → “low_uplift”
Ideal to leave at current pricing or allocate to conservative bidding strategies.
This approach helps retailers align pricing decisions with expected paid-search outcomes rather than relying on gut feeling or broad discounting.
How Feedoptimise Enables Automation and Consistent Label Updates
Feedoptimise integrates directly with Google Merchant Center using the official API. Through its reporting functionality the platform automatically retrieves:
- Benchmark price
- Benchmark price ratio
- Price competitiveness signals
- Potential traffic uplift estimates
This data can be processed into dynamic feed attributes or custom labels. Labels update automatically whenever Google refreshes the benchmark values, so Shopping campaigns always operate with current market information.
You can then use these labels in your bid strategies and campaign structure:
- Tiered campaigns based on competitiveness
- Custom label filters for Performance Max asset groups
- Rule-based bidding logic in external bid tools or Google Ads scripts
- Data-driven discounting workflows integrated with your feed
Practical Campaign Applications
Once the labels are in place, google shopping advertisers can apply them in several ways across their feeds:
a. Priority-structured Shopping campaigns
- High-priority for competitive products
- Medium for neutral
- Low for uncompetitive
b. Performance Max segmentation
Separate asset groups or listing groups using price-based labels to control budgets and signals more precisely.
c. Pricing optimisation loop
Using uplift labelling to identify products where discounting would have the largest impact, then feeding these insights back into pricing tools or promotional planning.
d. Smarter bidding
With labels indicating competitiveness and traffic potential, manual or automated bidding can be tuned around real market opportunities instead of treating all items equally.
Final Thoughts
Integrating Google Price Benchmark Report data into your Google Shopping product feed provides a measurable advantage in campaign optimisation. Feedoptimise makes this process seamless by pulling benchmark metrics directly from Google Merchant Center and modifying them into actionable product labels. These labels allow retailers and digital marketers to align bids, discounting, and campaign prioritisation with real market competitiveness.