As one of the biggest Health and Beauty retailers in the UK, Superdrug stock hundreds of brands within a crowded market. With increased competition over ad space within the SERP, Superdrug needed to increase their market share and visibility across multiple key categories, whilst continuing to use Paid Search as a performance-driven channel.

To achieve this we deviated from the standard Google Shopping set-up, reevaluating how to take it to the next level. 

We knew that pricing played a significant role in consumer decision making which made us think: how can we ensure visibility when Superdrug has more favourable prices than the competition? Rather than solely focusing on marked down products where Superdrug was only competitive at a profit reduction, we wanted a benchmarking system where the cost of a product with Superdrug could be dynamically compared with the price of the same product sold with other retailers, with bids adjusted accordingly. 

This involved a  two stage setup – an initial system for incorporating price competitiveness information on an individual SKU level within Superdrug’s Shopping feed, identifying how the product’s pricing compared for  Superdrug to the cohort average; and a bidding setup where an update in a SKUs comparative price would either increase or decrease the bid at auction for that product.  

We benchmarked historic CPCs of product categories then compared SKU price with Superdrug to the average of all advertisers at auction & ranked based on competitiveness. This price competitiveness data was then pushed into the Shopping feed.

From here the bid assigned to each SKU dynamically updated based on how competitive Superdrug were.