Google loves a sale.
Your sale.
They’ll reward you with more visibility in their Shopping results if your products go on sale.
Should I Put My Products on Sale?
Only you can truly answer that but here’s some scenarios:
- “I have great margins on my products”
- You should test running discounts*
- *Unless you’re maxing out shopping impression/click share already and have very few competitors in shopping results
- *Unless you’re maxing out shopping impression/click share already and have very few competitors in shopping results
- You should test running discounts*
- “My margins are okay on most of my products”
- How are sales? Are you hitting your targets? If things are going well, I probably wouldn’t run sales just for more visibility
- If you’re missing order targets (and have room to grow in impression/click share), but your ROAS is healthy, then you could consider testing some sale prices
- “My margins are terrible, razor thin”
- Stay away from sales and focus on making your Google Ads account as efficient as possible instead
You should have all your COGS (cost of goods sold)/margins nailed down and know what your current return on ad spend is.
Don’t continue dumping money into Google ads without knowing that sort of data!
If you’re lucky enough to have great margins you’ll likely have a lot of room to test and find the “sweet spot” on pricing for Google shopping.
Google Price Suggestions and Automatic Discounts
Google is providing price suggestions for you.
It’s been around for a bit, but they’ve made it more prominent in the new Merchant Center Next.
If there’s enough data on your products, and you’re priced higher than enough similar products/brands, they’ll give you an idea of how much your clicks on that product could increase.
There’s also a new feature called Automated Discounts.
You can find that by going to Settings > Add-ons.
With that feature Google will “continuously optimize product sale prices based on market signals”.
For eligibility, you need to have Conversion Tracking with Cart Data and you need to be willing to let Google adjust pricing on at least 20% of your total shopping impressions.
Test with Caution…
…and data.
Again, don’t just blindly start dropping prices.
Make sure you can truly afford to experiment with price drops and discounts.
If you see that Google is suggesting that a price adjustment can get you more clicks, do you have room on margins to do that?
If you have some room, start testing it on a few products, you may find that an increase in sales volume makes up for the drop in margin.