Google Merchant Center shows relative visibility, page overlap rate, higher position rate metrics

Competitive visibility reports in Google Merchant Center are now available in open beta, Google has confirmed to Search Engine Land. The metrics within the reports include relative visibility, page overlap rate and higher position rate.

Tip of the hat to Gianpaolo Lorusso for bringing this to our attention.

Why we care. Competitive visibility metrics can help merchants understand how often their competitors’ offers are shown compared to their offers, how frequently competitors’ offers are shown together with their offer on the same page and how often a competitor’s offer was placed in a higher position than their offer.

This data can help merchants get a more detailed view of their reach across Shopping ads and free listings (specifically or combined), who their competitors are and how visible their offers are compared to their competitors, which may help to identify aspects of their campaigns that they can improve for greater relative visibility.

The metrics. The competitive visibility report covers three metrics — relative visibility, page overlap rate and higher position rate. Here is how Google defined each of those metrics.

• Relative visibility: Relative visibility shows how often your competitors’ offers are shown compared to your offers. In other words, this is the number of displayed impressions of a competitor retailer divided by the number of your displayed impressions during a selected time range for a selected product category and country.
• Page overlap rate: Page overlap rate describes how frequently competing retailers’ offers are shown together with your offers on the same page. In other words, this shows the number of times in which you and a competing merchant received an impression for at least one displayed offer divided by the number of times in which you received an impression for at least one offer.
• Higher position rate: Higher position rate shows how often a competitor’s offer got placed in a higher position on the page than your offer. In other words, the number of times in which the competing merchant received an impression for at least one product in a higher position on the page than you, divided by the number of times in which you and a merchant appeared together on the same page.

How to access the competitive visibility report. The report is currently limited to offers that are eligible to generate traffic in the United States. After signing into their Merchant Center account, merchants can click Performance within the page menu. Next, select Competitive visibility.

The report includes two tabs. The first tab (“Your competitors”) displays the competitive visibility of pre-selected competitors, while the second tab (“Top merchants”) displays the aggregated competitive visibility of top-performing merchants. Both tabs can be filtered by product category, listing type and time range.