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 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 Product, Brand, or Category by clicking the segment’s name at the bottom of the dashboard.
- To see 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 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 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.
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 customers had the option to visit your website.
If your products show zero impressions, you should verify the products are approved and wait a few days for impressions to show up. Impressions may also not show if they are below a minimum threshold.
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%.