Google Updates Search Console With New Merchant Reports

Google announced an update to search console that provides merchants with the power to accurately gauge the search performance of their product listings and product snippets.

Search console has two new ways to see the SEO impact in the SERPs, providing impression and click data from the two different search appearances.

The official Google Search Central Twitter account tweeted:

“Today, we are adding the ability to measure the impact of Merchant listing by splitting the Product results search appearance into two:

Merchant listings and Product snippets.

These appearances let you see how many impressions and clicks you get from those experiences.

The new Merchant listings and Product snippets search appearances can be viewed in two places in Search Console:

• Merchant listings and product snippets reports as an overlay on top of the report charts
• Performance report in the search appearance tab or through a filter”

Screenshot by Google, modified by author to fit webpage

Expanded Eligibility Product Snippets Search Appearances

The Product Snippets Search Appearances is a feature that was opened up to all merchants using the Products Structured Data markup on their sites, without having to submit a product feed.

Google announced the expanded eligibility for for enhanced product experiences in search in September 2022.

The September 2022 announcement explained:

“For some time, Google has provided shoppers with rich product experiences in search results. To make these experiences more accessible to website owners, Google has expanded eligibility for websites that implement structured data. For website owners, there are two broad categories of experiences:

Merchant listing experiences for web pages that allow shoppers to buy a product on the site.
Product snippets for a broader set of web pages with product information (including pages that sell products, publish product reviews, and/or aggregate information from other sites).”

The update announced today means that merchants will now be able to track the impact of those two kinds of merchant search experiences.

I asked Adam J. Humphreys, founder of Founder at Making 8 digital marketing consultancy, what his thoughts are on the Search Console improvements.

Adam was pleased with the changes.

He commented:

“The ability to see product results in the search appearance report with clicks/impressions helps businesses understand where they are and where they can improve.

I would love to see the average ranking with this so that owners know where their product is and for what queries it was most commonly seen for.

Product snippets is nice because it shows issues with formatting.

Think of e-commerce as like schema markup where you have tons of fields such at GTIN etc.

Google uses these search filters to sort merchant products.

This encourages business owners and devs to improve their more often than not unfilled fields.

Unfortunately, unfilled fields is an issue for even some of the very largest brands.”

Merchants are encouraged to log in to Search Console and explore the new reports.

Featured image by Shutterstock/NaMong Productions