Merchant Center offers you different ways to find out how your ads and free listings are performing. This key data can help you decide what strategy will work best for getting your products in front of the right audiences.
Before you begin
Before it can start creating performance information, Merchant Center needs to be able to access some tracking data from your ads and free listings.
You can do this using your Google Ads account or by adding selected attributes to your Merchant Center feeds. Learn more about tracking your product performance
Where to view your performance data
- An overview of your performance reporting appears on the “Overview” page.
- Find Shopping ads data in the "Performance (Shopping ads)" card.
- Find free listings and free local listings data in the "Performance (free listings)" card.
- For a deeper view of your aggregated data, click "Performance" and then "Dashboard" in the left-hand navigation menu. Then, click either the "Shopping ads", "Free listings", "Free local listings", or "Buy on Google" tab above the dashboard.
- You can segment each metric into "Country", "Product", "Brand", or "Category" by clicking the segment’s name at the bottom of the dashboard.
- To view data for an individual product, click "Products" in the left-hand navigation menu, and then click "All Products". The number of clicks from free listings and free local listings for each product offer appears in the “Unpaid clicks” column. Shopping ads clicks are shown in the "Clicks" column.
- You can compare holistic performance across ads and free listings by creating custom reports and dashboards. Learn more about custom reports in Merchant Center
- To review the performance of your deals (your products with promotion, sale, or price drop badges, for example) across Shopping ads and free listings, click “Performance” and then “Dashboard” in the left-hand navigation menu. Then, click either the “Shopping ads” or “Free listings” tab above the dashboard to view your performance in the “Traffic for promotion, sale and price drop badges” card.
- You can split metrics by "Country", "Product", "Brand", or "Category" by clicking the segment’s name at the bottom of the card.
- To review reports that split your deals performance by "Badge type", "Promotion", or "Promotion category", you can click on the related report at the bottom of the card.
- The currency column applies only to monetary metrics (for example, Conversion value or Ordered item sales). Remaining metrics are reported under "None."
- Some discrepancies in data are expected between MC and Ads, because the way clicks, impressions, and conversions are attributed to products in MC and how they are attributed to campaigns in Ads are different.
Types of performance metrics
Clicks
Clicks count the total number of clicks on your products on Google (excluding Google rich results and image search) that led to visits to your website. A visit to a website is reported if the click leads to a desktop landing page, mobile landing page, or an app.
For free local listings, we also count the clicks to merchant- or Google-hosted local storefronts. These are clicks on product links in your product data feeds.
Impressions
Impressions count how often your products were shown on Google (excluding Google rich results and image search). We only count impressions where customers had the option to visit your website.
If your products show zero impressions, you should verify that the products are approved and wait a few days for impressions to show up. Impressions may also not show if they’re below a minimum threshold.
Clickthrough rate (CTR)
The CTR shows how often clicks on your products on Google (excluding Google rich results and image search) led to visits to your website.
- CTR is the number of clicks that your product listing receives divided by the number of times it’s shown: clicks ÷ impressions = CTR.
- For example, if you had 5 clicks and 100 impressions, then your CTR would be 5%.
Conversion metrics
Conversions
Conversions are the actions (for example, clicks on your product) that are counted when someone interacts with your products on Google (excluding Google rich results and image search) and then takes a specific action on your website or app (for example, buys your product). When an impression starts on product A but leads to a purchase of product A and B, then conversion values are only attributed to product A (and product B has 0 conversion value).
Keep in mind: Conversions are reported on conversion date but the other metrics are reported on impression date. As an implication: conversions divided by clicks for a given day might not result in the conversion rate for the day.