New Crealytics feature: Price Advisor

Google Shopping takes product price transparency to a new level. Unsurprisingly, people tend to click on the cheaper product when the same product is sold by multiple retailers. This human tendency, means that Google’s learning algorithms will often surface the cheapest products first even if they don’t have the highest bid.

The result, is that if you sell the same brands or products as someone else, where your product price falls in relation to your competitors, heavily influences your traffic and conversion volumes. Product price becomes, next to the bid, the most important factor to attract shoppers on Google Shopping.

Which product variant is a shopper more likely to click?

That is very different to Text Ads, which do not allow to users to compare prices so easily. With product pricing decisions being so hugely important to channel performance, there seems to be a dilemma:

• If you price your products too high, you will lose on clicks and subsequent sales.
• On the other hand, if you price your products too low, you will lose margins and profitability.

While price levels are very visible to individual shoppers, it’s nearly impossible for PPC managers to monitor these at scale. Which is ironic because those decisions are hugely important to channel performance.

Does this mean that you have to lower all your product prices and engage in price wars? Not necessarily.

A way out of the price dilemma

To help solve the pricing problem, we analyzed thousands of online retail transactions. It turns out, that the products people click on in Google Shopping are not necessarily the products they end up buying. Only a third of shoppers actually buy the product they clicked on. Sometimes, they buy from the same brand, the same category or a different brand and category all together.

Based on this information, we figured out that the most important role of Google Shopping is to get shoppers to your site when they express relevant search-intent. By discounting a few selected high impact products with a lot of search volume, you can attract more shoppers to your site and then up-sell or cross-sell to them, thereby preserving your margins.

However, this is challenging to do. Beyond identifying the products with high demand, you need to monitor the competitive landscape systematically. The more products you offer, the harder this gets.

Get important price recommendations automatically

The Crealytics Price Advisor does solves both of those issues for you. It identifies a few selected high impact products and gives price recommendations based on the competitive landscape and search data.

Using Price Advisor you can:

• Identify high impact products that are too expensive – lowering prices for these helps you to acquire new shoppers to your site.

• Identify high impact products that are too cheap – raising prices for these helps you to sell at higher margins without the risk of losing market share.

All Crealytics customers can use the Price Advisor for UK, US or German market if their feed contains valid GTINs. If you have any questions, thoughts, comments or just want to chat, feel free to reach out to your Crealytics account manager to learn more.

Not a Crealytics customer yet? To learn more about how our Smart Shopping Automation tool can help you get the most from your campaigns, get in touch with us using the form below and we’ll be more than happy to tell you all about it!

Additional resources

The role of price on Google Shopping performance

A study into Google Shopping’s low price bias (and 4 ways to overcome it)