Pamela SapioLeave it to the team at Solutions 8 to uncover hidden tools that can greatly enhance your paid ad performance and drive growth for your business.
In this video, Account Manager Frank Schaefer shares with viewers a free tool within the Google Merchant Center (GMC) that he calls the best product and market research tool he has seen.
The tool is called the Best sellers report, and it offers valuable insight that business owners and account managers can use to conduct product research, view and analyze trends, and identify opportunities for brand and product expansion.
“I haven’t seen anyone talking about this,” says Frank, who adds that the tool is so good he almost didn’t want to make this video and give away his secret sauce!
Where to find the Best sellers report
You can access the Best sellers report in your GMC account on the left side menu under Growth; it should be the third option down, right below Price competitiveness.
If you do not see the Best sellers report, it may not be available to you. Frank says it only shows up in about half of his accounts so far, and that it seems to correlate with accounts that have an Excellent rating on their Shopping experience scorecard for people in the U.S.
Pro tip: If the Best sellers report is in at least one of your accounts, Frank says you can easily apply it to anything else you need to research.
What does it show you?
Using the Best sellers report, you can sort by time period and look at the top products and top brands in any of Google’s categories and locations that it is supported in. Frank uses the example of the Sporting Goods category (location: U.S.) and illustrates how you can see the category’s popularity rank, the change in rank from the preceding week, the relative demand for that category, images and titles, as well as the popular variants (GTIN), brand, and price range for countless other products.
The sheer amount of valuable information provided by the report is why Frank says it is one of the best product research tools he has ever seen. If you are an advertiser or a business and you are looking to expand your product line, the Best sellers report can help you see which products already have really good demand inside of Google Shopping.
“If that’s your main promotional avenue, this is a no-brainer,” says Frank.
Users can go in, select their category, browse through dozens if not hundreds of subcategories and sub-subcategories. Resellers can even hand-pick categories that already have the GTIN, which comes along with the product data and reviews; they can then leverage that data in Google Ads, start a Standard Shopping campaign or a Performance Max campaign, and then run some product ads and start getting sales quickly.
A deeper dive into the categories
Frank digs more deeply into the category options, showing viewers the wide range of possibilities, from office supplies to animal and pet supplies, apparel, electronics, furniture, home and garden, luggage, toys and games, vehicle parts, and more. Within each category are many more subcategories and sub-subcategories, and Frank says the combinations are really endless. He does note that the popularity rank is based on the estimated number of products sold.
“As is normal with Google, they’re kind of vague about that,” he says. “I don’t know if it factors in the conversions they see happen in the Google Ads account or not, or if it’s just based on the number of clicks and average industry conversion rates.” (He assumes the latter.)
So, there is some vagueness, especially since Google is trying not to violate anyone’s privacy, explains Frank, but just being able to know that there is high demand for a specific product or category, or that it is getting an extremely high number of clicks, is incredibly valuable for businesses trying to compete. Users can also see the change from the preceding week, or look at data on a monthly or weekly basis. You can even go back in time, says Frank.
“It seems to be about two years worth of data that you can leverage and research, find trends in different quarters, so maybe in Q4 you can see the products that sell really well seasonally in certain verticals.”
Within the Best sellers report, you can also look at top brands and see how they are ranked in order of popularity. You can then drill down further into each brand’s products and how popular each product is. “So, if you’re looking to start a business or expand your line—maybe you’re already selling some but you’re missing some top sellers—this is the perfect way to find that,” Frank concludes.
Ready to check out? Definitely let us know what you think!
