6 Vital Reasons to use Price Benchmarking in your PPC Campaign

Google Adwords is rolling out a new feature for advertisers: price comparison insights. Advertisers will now be able to easily compare their product with other competitors in the Google Shopping market and view which of these entries are cheaper.

Price benchmarking is an important task to carry out on a regular basis if you’re running a paid campaign selling products that are also available from other outlets. It can be quite a daunting task, particularly if you have a huge inventory of items, but is vital for your campaigns. With Google Shopping especially, price is a huge factor in persuading users to click through. As all the products are displayed in adverts a line, price is one of the biggest factors to make yours stand out.

Price benchmarking provides a variety of benefits including:

Understand The Marketplace

With marketing it’s important to have as many insights as possible, to factor in every outcome that may affect your sales. You need a good understanding of your customers, through buyer personas, but you also need a thorough understanding of your product and the marketplace. If your product is more expensive than competitors, you need to be aware and have a reason to justify this – is your company positioned as more of a luxury brand? Does your product have additional features that consumers will be willing to pay more for? Or, at the other end of the scale, are you undervaluing your services and pricing yourself too low?

It Helps You Establish Your USP

Are you really the cheapest on the market? If not don’t worry – being aware of your product price against competitors allows you to comfortably choose the USP to suit you. ‘Free Delivery’, ‘half price installation’ and ‘buy one get one free’ are all examples of advert headlines that provide a USP – and all benefits you can choose to offer your customer if your pricing is more expensive. You don’t simply have to be the ‘cheapest online’.

Accurately Review Your Campaign Performance

Is your Google Shopping campaign underperforming without an obvious reason? Or do your search PPC campaigns have an unusually high bounce rate? It could be because your products are more expensive than competitors. Having an accurate overview of your prices compared to competitors gives an extra layer of insights when reviewing your campaign performance.

Inform Internal Processes

Evidence of competitor prices allows your marketing team to pass back solid and useful information to internal departments on the pricing of your product lines across the company.

Streamline Wasted Spend

If there are some products you’ll never be able to be competitive on, then simply turning them off may be the answer. By taking those products out of your paid search advertising campaign you’ll prevent wasted spend from consumers clicking on your advert to research before inevitably purchasing elsewhere – allowing you to instead focus your campaigns on the limited products that you can be competitive with.

Impact Your Bidding Strategies

As with streamlining your wasted spend, having an accurate insight of competitors advertised prices allows you to prioritise which of your campaigns should be high priority and which items to bid higher of lower on.

How Can I Compare My Prices?

Price benchmarking can be done manually, by searching the internet online. But for many retailers with big inventories this can be too time exhaustive, and there may not be enough internal resources to concentrate on this. Price comparison software can be purchased for a relatively low monthly cost, and will let you run automated checks on a real-time responsive basis to ensure you’re always aware of pricing opportunities and threats.

To find out more about price comparison software, or for help optimising your paid search performance based on competitor insights, get in touch with our team today.