Merch Intel

Disclaimer: This is not an officially supported Google product.

Merch Intel is a dashboard for visualizing Market Insights data from Google Merchant Center. This includes best-selling products and brands, competitive price points, sale price suggestions, and information about the competitive landscape for your industry.

1. The Problem

Developing product pricing strategy based on Merchant Center Market Insights can be a manual and time-consuming process. Merchants need to manually gather the data and share it with their internal teams, a lengthy process that leads to delays in pricing decisions, potential inaccuracies and difficulty in adapting quickly to market changes.

2. The Solution

Merch Intel is a Looker Studio dashboard that connects Merchant Center and Google Ads data to surface Pricing and Popular Products information, integrated with advertisers’ own performance data, all in one single place. It's a single dashboard that consolidates all Market Insights available in Merchant Center and can be shared by the advertiser with internal teams (e.g. Merchandising, Pricing, Marketing).

Use cases vary depending on the advertiser's goals. With Merch Intel, you can: -

• Leverage price benchmark to develop a more informed and competitive pricing strategy that's based on accurate data.
• Identify opportunities to expand product offerings to capitalize on current trends & popular products, making your product inventory more relevant to your customers.
• Spot emerging opportunities of products with high demand that are out of stock and have a high potential of driving more sales.

3. Installation

3.1. Prerequisites

3.1.1. A Google Cloud project with billing enabled

You may skip this step if you already have a Google Cloud account with billing enabled.

• Create a Google Cloud account

• Create and manage projects

• Manage your Cloud Billing account

3.1.2. Google Merchant Center, Google Ads and Google Cloud permissions

The user running the installation script will need the following permissions:

• Standard access for Google Merchant Center

• Standard access for Google Ads

• Editor (or owner) role in the Google Cloud project

3.2. Setup local environment

3.2.1. Option 1: Cloud Shell

Merch Intel can be installed directly in the Google Cloud console using Cloud Shell, which comes with gcloud already installed. It does however disconnect after 1 hour without any user interaction and may require, for Google Merchant Center accounts with a large number of products, the user to press Enter while the script is running to reset the timer.

3.2.2. Option 2: Local

Merch Intel can also be installed on a local environment, which will not time out but requires gcloud to be installed and set up manually:

• Install Google Cloud CLI

3.3. Download source code

Open Cloud Shell or your terminal (if running locally) and download the repository from GitHub.

git clone https://github.com/google-marketing-solutions/merch-intel

3.4. Run install script

The following values will be needed to run the installation script:

• Google Cloud project ID

• Google Merchant Center ID

• Google Ads customer ID

cd merch-intel;
sh setup.sh --project_id=<project_id> --merchant_id=<merchant_id> --ads_customer_id=<ads_customer_id>

During installation, the script may ask you to open authorization URLs in the browser. Follow the instructions to proceed.

The script will perform the following:

• Enable Google Cloud components and Google APIs:

• BigQuery

• BigQuery Data Transfer

• Create the Google Merchant Center and Google Ads BigQuery data transfers.

• Set up a daily job that will create the InventoryView and BestSellerWeeklyProductView Merch Intel tables

3.5. Creating dashboard

Once you're done with the deployment of the code in GCP and you have all the tables created, it's time to make a copy of the dashboard template and point it to your recently created data.

• Start by joining this Google Group in order to have access to the template dashboard. Make sure to be logged in your Google account before accessing the link.
• Open the template dashboard using this link.
• At the dashboard template, click the 3-dot menu on the top right, then click "Make a copy".
• You'll see a popup asking you to pick the data sources for the new dashboard. There's no need to choose a different data source for now, even though you see the warning signs there. Just click "Copy report".
• A new tab is going to open, with your dashboard. On the top menu, click Resource > Manage added data sources.
• On this screen, you'll replace the template data sources your newly created ones, in BigQuery. You'll perform these next steps twice, once for InventoryView and once for the BestSellerWeeklyProductView. Click EDIT under actions on the first data source.
• On the next screen, click My Projects on the left-hand side of the screen and navigate to the Project Id you used to deploy Merch Intel. The Dataset Id should be merch_intel, the default name when you deploy it and the names of the tables will be the same as the name of the data sources in Looker Studio: InventoryView and BestSellerWeeklyProductView.
• Click the Connect button at the top right of that screen and feel free to click Apply for any possible semantic changes in the popup that shows (you may not see that popup and that's fine).
• Make sure to click Done after you're finished linking both your new data sources.
• You can now close the "Data sources" menu and you should have your dashboard ready to be shared and used.

Note - Performance metrics in the dashboard may take 12-24 hours to appear.

4. Use Cases

We've discussed the insights you can take out of each view of the dashboard and added suggested actions that could be taken based on those insights. You can access that information in the links below:

• Price Benchmark
• Benchmark Breakdown
• Price Suggestion
• Best Sellers Overview
• Best Sellers Details

There is also a Glossary tab at the dashboard (the last one) that goes over the definitions of each metric and dimension on the dashboard. You can also find the Glossary here.