The product is the same, the ads are running, and people click the shop next door. Often the reason is simple: a person sees the price before the click and compares. In shopping ads (cards with a photo, a name and a price in Google results, also called Shopping) the price is not hidden somewhere on your site. It is out in the open.
Below: where to see your price against the market, why the report may be empty, what to do if a competitor is cheaper, and the trap that pulls the price on your site and the price in Google apart. We checked the facts against Google’s help on 15 October 2026. Menu names follow Google’s English help; depending on the interface version they may differ slightly.
What the buyer sees before the click
According to Google Ads help, a product ad shows a photo, the product name and price, and the name of the store. So a person sees all of this before going to your site. The help also gives an example of the results: for a query, product ads from different sellers of matching products are shown.
There is no direct sentence saying “your price sits next to your neighbours’ prices”, so check it yourself in a minute. Type the name of your best-selling product into Google the way a buyer would, and look at the block with products: how many stores are there, what each one charges, and where you are.
Step 1. See your price next to the market price
There is a report for this in Merchant Center. That is the free Google account where a store uploads data about its products. The path: “Analytics” → the “Pricing” tab. For each product it has these columns:
- “Your price”: the price shoppers see in Google;
- “Benchmark”: according to Google’s help, the average price that typically leads to more successful ad auctions, impressions, clicks or conversions. It is calculated from the prices of all retailers advertising the same product, in shopping ads and in free listings;
- “Price gap”: by what percentage your price differs from the benchmark;
- “Clicks”: clicks on the product in the last 28 days;
- “Price distribution”: how many of your products are priced higher than, similar to or lower than the benchmark.
The “View” button on a card opens a detailed list. Start with your best sellers, not the whole catalogue: the money is usually there.
A limitation from the help: Google shows only current prices, and the report has no history of changes. Instead of Merchant API or BigQuery, it is simpler to save a screenshot once a week. That is our advice, not a Google requirement.
Empty tab? Check the GTIN
Google calculates the benchmark by the rule “the same product”, and it decides what is “the same” by the GTIN. Simply put, it is the product’s barcode number from the manufacturer (Google’s help calls it a Global Trade Item Number). Without a valid GTIN, as the help says, there will be no comparison data, neither for your products nor for other sellers’ prices.
What to do yourself:
- Take a product the report is empty for and look at the packaging: the number under the barcode, usually 12 to 14 digits.
- In Merchant Center open “Products” and find that product. Check whether it has a GTIN.
- If the number is missing but is on the packaging, add it to the product data or to the file you upload it from.
Google’s help adds: if the manufacturer has assigned a number to a product and you did not submit it, the product may be disapproved. If a product has no number (own production, handmade), you do not need to submit one, and Google advises giving the brand and the manufacturer’s part number instead. Price comparison simply will not work for such products, and that is normal. In our experience, this is the most common reason for an empty report.
The benchmark is a guide, not a verdict
How many clicks you lose for each percent of price increase, Google does not say. There is no such figure in the help, and we did not find a direct statement there that “pricing above the benchmark means fewer clicks” either: it only says this is the price at which a product typically performs better.
Practitioners say different things. Some regard price as the main lever of shopping ads and advise following the market. Others note that in some niches the benchmark is not objective, so you should not rely on it alone. Some descriptions call it a median, while Google’s help says “average price”. We do not quote thresholds such as “10-20% more expensive”: they come only from third-party blogs without a primary source, and Google does not publish such a figure. Some agencies describe clicks falling after a price rise and returning after a cut, but those are stories, not an experiment.
What follows: a red row in the report is a reason to look at the product more closely, not a reason to cut the price at once. A price below your margin costs you more than the lost clicks.
More expensive? You do not have to cut the price
There are a few things you can do instead of slashing the price.
Look at Google’s suggestions. The same “Pricing” tab has a block “Sale price suggestions with highest performance impact”. Google shows a recommended price and a forecast of growth in clicks and conversions. The conditions from the help: you need to report purchase conversions, and suggestions appear only when Google sees a significant opportunity. This is a forecast, not a guarantee. And one more thing: if you use automated discounts, these suggestions stop appearing for the products they cover. A similarly named feature exists in Google Ads, automated promotions, and we wrote about it separately. These are different settings, so do not confuse them.
Set up the discount correctly. The sale price goes into a separate attribute, sale_price, while the full price stays in price. According to the help, the discount must be greater than 5% and less than 90%, both prices must be visible on the product page, and checkout uses the sale price. There is a nuance with the crossed-out “old” price. Sources disagree here. Practitioners often quote one rule for everyone: the regular price must hold for at least 30 days out of 200. Google’s help is more precise: for the US in shopping ads it is 5 days of the last 30 or 15 of the last 200, and for a number of other countries 30 out of 200. We did not find Ukraine among the countries named. So whether the discount will show that way in Ukraine, the help does not say. And even when all conditions are met, Google does not guarantee that such a label will be shown.
What makes a product stand out without a price cut. Free delivery, a promotion, reviews. But for a store in Ukraine there is a caveat that is easy to miss. The fast and free delivery badge is described in Google’s help for eight countries (Australia, Brazil, the UK, India, Canada, New Zealand, the US, Japan), and Merchant promotions, the promotions you send to Google through a separate data source, for thirteen. Ukraine is on neither list. Delivery and promotions still matter, because the buyer sees your terms on your page, but do not count on Google highlighting them in the ad. The store rating has its own conditions, and we wrote about them in the article on stars next to ads.
The trap: your price and Google’s price do not match
It happens like this: the price on the site was lowered, but the ad still shows the old one. Or the product disappeared from display altogether. This is “Mismatched product price”: the price in the data you gave Google does not match the price on your site.
The causes, according to Google’s help:
- prices on the site changed faster than the data in Merchant Center was updated;
- errors in the product page markup (structured data), which Google also reads the price from;
- Google’s crawler sees a different price or currency than a person does, for example because of a script on the page;
- wrong dates or time zone for a sale.
What it risks: a product with a mismatch may be disapproved, meaning it stops showing in ads. And the help warns directly that price mismatches may lead to an account suspension.
Where to look: Merchant Center → “Products” → the “Needs attention” tab, then filter by this issue. For one product, open it and change the price to the one on your site. For many, download the list as CSV, correct it and upload it back. If your prices change often, set up automatic updates on a schedule: the help itself advises this.
What we advise doing
This is our practice, not a Google rule.
- Once a week open “Analytics” → “Pricing” and look at your best sellers: where the “Price gap” has clearly turned positive.
- Before cutting, check the margin. If the discount eats it, think of another lever: a promotion, delivery terms, reviews.
- After every price change, check the “Needs attention” tab for a new mismatch.
- Search for your product in Google with several queries, from a phone and a computer: one search does not give the full picture.
Summary
- In shopping ads the price is visible before the click, so being more expensive than the market means the click may go to a neighbour.
- See your price against the benchmark in Merchant Center: “Analytics” → “Pricing”.
- Empty? Most likely the GTIN is missing.
- The benchmark is a guide: Google does not give an exact figure for how much you lose.
- You do not have to cut the price, but the price in your data must match the price on your site.
How we run shopping advertising is described in the sections on Shopping and Merchant Center.
Want a free audit of your Google Ads account? Send us a request — we will look at your account and tell you where the price keeps products from selling and where the problem is in the data.