Merchant Center offers you different ways to find out how your ads and free product 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 see 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 Performance (paid) card
- Find free listings and free local listings data in the Performance (unpaid) card
- For a deeper view of your aggregated data, click Performance and then Dashboard in the left-hand navigation menu. Then, click either the Free product listings, Free local product listings or Buy on Google tab above the dashboard.
- You can segment each metric into Product, Brand, or Category by clicking the segment’s name at the bottom of the dashboard.
- To see free listings data for an individual product, click Products in the left-hand navigation menu, and then click All Products. You’ll see the number of clicks from free listings and free local listings for each product offer in the “Unpaid clicks” column. Shopping ads clicks are shown as "clicks".
- Compare holistic performance across ads and free listings by creating custom reports and dashboards. Learn more about custom reports in Merchant Center
Types of performance metrics
Clicks
We report clicks if they lead to visits to your website (desktop landing pages, mobile landing pages, or apps). For free local listings, we additionally 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 are shown. An impression is counted each time your Shopping ad, free listing, or free local listing is shown. We only count impressions where users had the option to visit your website.
If your products show zero impressions, then you should verify the products are approved and wait for a few days for impressions to show up. Impressions may also not show if they are below a minimum threshold.;
Note: Impressions data is available beginning October 7, 2020.
Clickthrough rate (CTR)
Your clickthrough rate (CTR) describes how often people who see your Shopping ad, free listing, or free local listing end up clicking on it.
- CTR is the number of clicks that your 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%.