New Google Ads Retail Category Reporting

If you’re a retailer running ads on Google, it’s likely you are running both Search and Shopping campaigns types. However, it can be difficult to analyze product performance across different campaign types.

With Google’s new beta retail category reporting, you can see your performance for pre-defined product categories across your Search and Shopping campaigns in one report. This more holistic approach to reporting will help you understand the full value of your Search and Shopping campaigns.

Retail category reporting is only available for searches on Google.com platforms, include:

• Google search results page
• Google Shopping tab
• Google Images tab

How Retail Category Reporting Works

Google assigns a retail category to all the ad impressions for a given search term using the Google Product Taxonomy. Retail categories are labels that Google uses to categorize the words that people search for. When someone searches and triggers a Shopping or Search ad, Google labels that ad impression with the “Retail category”. These categories are determined by Google and can’t be customized.

You can then report your performance across Search and Shopping using those categories. Some of the metrics available per retail category include:

• Retail category
• Performance metrics
• Attributes (campaign type and name)
• Conversion metrics

Where To Find Retail Category Reporting

You can access your retail category reports either through the predefined reports or by customizing which metrics you want to evaluate using the Report Editor. Since this report is still in beta, you may not see it in your account yet.

Using predefined reports for retail category reporting

Use predefined reports to help you discover the new categories and understand in which context they should be used and interpreted.

To open a predefined report:

1. Sign in to your Google Ads account
2. Click the reporting icon  in the upper corner.
3. Select Predefined reports (Dimensions).
4. Under “Basic,” click on Retail category (Search and Shopping).

Using the Report Editor for retail category reporting

By using the report editor, you can evaluate the performance of your Search and Shopping campaigns across different retail category levels and ad groups. You can also filter for various performance metrics, such as clicks, cost, conversions, and click share.

1. Sign in to your Google Ads account.
2. Click the reporting icon  in the upper corner, then select Reports.
3. Click the blue plus button  in the top left-hand corner of the page, then select Table, Line chart, Bar chart, Pie chart or Scatter chart.
4. Drag and drop retail category level(s) into the “Row” window at the top of the table.
5. Drag and drop the metrics you want to evaluate into the “Column” window.

If you’re a retailer, have you used retail category reporting for your accounts? If so, let us know if the comments below!