How to track competitor prices for Google Shopping

If you sell your own brand, you cannot look up a competitor’s price for the same product: nobody else carries it, so there is no barcode to match. You can still track competitor prices for Google Shopping. Compare your products with the alternatives shoppers weigh against them, then read where your price sits next to ad performance.

The method comes from Competitor Prices, the Product Metrics feature that matches own-brand products on dimensions instead of barcodes. For a small range, the same steps work in a spreadsheet.

Decide what “the same product” means

Competitor price tracking only works if you compare like with like. For branded products that is easy: the same GTIN is the same product. Google’s own price benchmarks in Merchant Center work this way, comparing against other retailers that sell the same GTIN.

For own-brand products the barcode is yours alone, so GTIN matching returns nothing. Instead, compare on the dimensions your customers compare on. For a running trainer, that is use, cushioning, drop, plate, weight and colour. A Nike Pegasus 42 and an adidas Supernova Rise 3 share no barcode, yet a shopper weighs them against each other.

Compare on the dimensions shoppers use

Pick them from how shoppers talk about the category rather than from the fields in your product data. Running shoes are judged on drop and cushioning, sofas on seat depth, coffee on roast and origin. Keep the list short, five to seven dimensions, and decide how many must match before two products count as comparable. Competitor Prices uses 75% of your approved dimensions, so one near-miss does not discard an otherwise good comparison.

Use one price basis

The basis has to be the same for every product. We compare list prices without shipping costs, so every product in a category is compared on its price alone. Note the date you checked: a price tracked last month is history.

Here four of the six alternatives match at least 75% of the approved dimensions. Their median is €129.98, so the €139.99 Pegasus 42 sits €10.01 above it. On its own that gap is no reason to cut the price; it is a question to put to the product’s margin and POAS.

A series shows what a snapshot can’t

A snapshot tells you where you stand today; a series shows where prices are heading. Keep one row per competitor product and one column per check, and plot them against your own price.

Eight weeks of checks show what any single one would miss. Competitor 1 went under you in week 3, then dropped another 8% (€136.00 to €124.95) in week 5 and partly recovered. Competitor 2 slid about 7% (€150.00 to €138.99) and now sits €1.00 under you. Competitor 3 stays above you throughout. Your price never moved, and you still went from cheapest to third of four.

Read price position next to POAS

Put a €10 gap next to margin, stock and ad results before you do anything with it. If the product gets clicks but misses its POAS target, a price above the median is one plausible reason. If it hits its target, the gap may be fine. Our guide to POAS vs ROAS explains why profit per product is the number to read the gap against, and what price intelligence is covers the difference between monitoring, intelligence and repricing.

For the Pegasus 42, Competitor Prices shows that €10.01 gap as a price position, a price ratio and a price difference, next to Product Score and the Merchant Center labels your campaigns can use. It shows where you stand, and your team decides what happens to the price.

Check on a schedule

Prices go stale quickly, so repeat the comparison regularly. Daily is 30 checks per product per month, weekly is 4 and monthly is 1. With the Price Monitoring add-on, one check of one product costs €0.004 excluding VAT.

When a spreadsheet stops scaling

A spreadsheet works for a handful of products: our free competitor price analysis template has the formulas. Past a few dozen products, look for software, and check it against this list.

Competitor Prices was built to that list. For a side-by-side of the options, see price monitoring software compared, and for the terms behind it, read what price intelligence is.

Start with ten products by hand

For real examples of how companies price against competitors, see competitive pricing examples. If the gaps on your own products turn out to matter, Competitor Prices tracks them for you, and the break-even ROAS calculator sets the targets to read them against.

To begin, list your ten highest-spend products, write down five dimensions per category and compare them once by hand.