Improve strategy & performance with insights

A lady wearing a blazer points a scanner at a product’s barcode.

You are reading part 5 of the 6-part 2022 Retail Marketing Guide. Jump to Chapter 6: Be ready for the holidays and seasonal shopping moments; Chapter 1: Customers turn to Google every day to browse, research, and buy; or Chapter 2: Build your brand and acquire new customers.

Brands using first-party data for key marketing functions achieved up to a 2.9X revenue lift and a 1.5X increase in cost savings¹

Today’s customer journey doesn’t follow a standard path — it’s diverse, nonlinear, and always evolving. People conduct research about products across a variety of devices, and marketers are looking for ways to deliver experiences that meet shoppers’ rising expectations.

For many marketers, the solution lies in gaining a deeper insight into how they can best tailor their ads and products to meet these needs. By leveraging first-party data, brands can also generate more high-quality leads through value based bidding and build loyalty with the right customers.

Find valuable insights for your campaigns with Google Ads

If you’re running ad campaigns, you have access to numerous solutions directly within Google Ads that can help you drive better results — from optimizing existing campaigns based on best practices to uncovering valuable insights about your audience that are tailored to your business and segment.

Review your optimization score

The optimization score is a tool on the Recommendations page that shows how well your account is set up to perform. It helps you prioritize which recommendations to apply for the best results. Scores run from 0% to 100%, giving you a clear path to reach 100% by applying the recommendations tailored to your Google Ads account.

Recommendations in Google Ads

Optimize your campaigns efficiently and reach your marketing objectives with recommendations. This is your source for real-time, personalized guidance from Google Ads that will help improve your campaigns. In fact, advertisers who used recommendations to increase their account-level optimization score by 10 points saw a median 14% increase in conversions.²

Insights page in Google Ads

It’s important to keep up with consumer demand in real time. Use the Insights page to stay on top of emerging search trends tailored to your business, so you can better understand your customer.

Inform your product and pricing strategy with insights in Merchant Center

Whether you’re looking to update your product mix based on what’s popular on Google or to better understand how your products and prices compare to your competitors’, Google has built several solutions and insight-driven reports directly into Merchant Center to help you better shape your retail strategies.

Best sellers report

Understand customer demand for brands and products with the best sellers report. This report shows you the most popular brands and products used in Shopping ads and free listings, and whether or not you currently carry them in your product feed.

Price competitiveness report

Receive guidance when you’re bidding on ads and pricing your products with the price competitiveness report. This report shows how other retailers are pricing the same products that you sell, and it can help you understand the price at which other retailers are successfully attracting clicks.

Competitive Visibility report

The Competitive Visibility report helps you understand your competitive landscape at the product-category level across free listings and Shopping ads. From there, you can make changes to your campaign investment, product inventory, or pricing to improve your visibility and capture more demand.