Don’t settle for the thousand-row limit in GSC. In this tutorial, I’ll explain how to get all of your Merchant Listings data from GSC, while also describing some other ideas for working with the data through Analytics Edge.
Merchant listings can be incredibly powerful for eCommerce merchants. These are free product listings that often appear in a “product grid” in the SERPs. When you click on each merchant listing, a product card will appear and you can view photos, reviews, and other information about a product. And of course, you can click through to view and purchase the product on a website. For more information about Google merchant listings, see their documentation.
Here is an example of merchant listings in the SERPs:
And when you click on a retailer listing, you’ll see a product card with more information:
In Google Search Console, you can filter merchant listing performance reports and view the queries that those merchant listings trigger. But like many reports in GSC, you can only view the thousand most common search queries or landing pages per report. For many eCommerce retailers, this data is simply not enough when analyzing website performance in GSC.
Over the past few months, I’ve been asked by several eCommerce merchants how I can get more Merchant Listings data from GSC. The answer actually lay in a previous post of mine about exporting GSC data via Search View, but that was published before Merchant Listings came out. With a tool like Analytics Edgeyou can Mass export Merchant listing data via the Search Console API. And this includes the page ranking and the search queries that lead to these retailer listings. And beyond just exporting the raw data, you can create delta reports to understand the change in clicks and impressions based on key algorithm updates, migrations, and more.
Below I’ll briefly explain what you need to do to bulk export merchant listing data from Search Console. Again, Analytics Edge is like a Swiss army knife for exporting GSC data. I use it almost daily. Note that Analytics Edge recently released a major upgrade, so some of the screenshots from my previous tutorials use an older version of the add-in. The following steps show the latest version (11.18.4).
X Marks the location: Find the search appearance key for dealer entries.
In 2019, I wrote a post explaining how to bulk export data from GSC by search occurrence. This is the approach you need to use to export merchant listing data. This is easy once you get the “key” for the search display. These are the codes used when exporting data via the API.
The Search Console API allows you to use a search appearance code when exporting data to filter for that specific type of search appearance. For example, you can export data by filtering AMP, merchant listings, product snippets, FAQs (if any), and more. So you need the code for the search representation you want to export.
My previous tutorial contains instructions on how to do this, but I’ll briefly cover this specifically for merchant listings below.
First, you’ll want to run a quick query using Analytics Edge to list all search appearance values for the specified GSC property. Although GSC clearly identifies this in the performance reports, it is not the search representation code that you must use through the API. So if you first export the search appearance codes for the property you’re analyzing, you can use those codes in further queries to export the data by search appearance.
To find the correct search appearance code:
1. Launch Excel and click the “Analytics Edge” tab in the top menu.
2. Then click Connector Wizards, select Google Search and then Search Analytics.
3. Then, on the Accounts tab, select the property you want to export data from. Note that you can work with domain properties from Analytics Edge. You will see them at the bottom of your property list.
4. Click the Fields tab and add searchAppearance to the Selected Dimensions.
5. Then click on the “Data” tab and select the date range you want to check. Again, in this step we only get the search representation codes. So select a date range where you would like to see the different search display options during that time period. You can select the last 3 or 6 months.
6. Then click OK. Once you can see the data stored in memory (in green), you can write it to a worksheet to see the search representation codes.
7. If you are an eCommerce merchant and your products are listed in the merchant lists, the code MERCHANT_LISTINGS will appear in the list. We want to use this for subsequent queries in Analytics Edge.
Now that we have the merchant listing search representation code, let’s bulk export the data from GSC using this code. For this example, we are exporting the last three months of merchant listing data.
To export merchant listing data in bulk using the search appearance code you just discovered:
1. In Excel, first click on the Analytics Edge menu. Next, create a new macro so that you can save this query (or a series of queries) for later use. Click the drop-down arrow and select “New Macro.” Then name it whatever you want.
2. Next, click Connector Wizards, select Google Search, and then Search Analytics.
2. Then, on the Accounts tab, select a property to export dealer listing data for that property. Again, you can use a domain property (it’s at the bottom of the list in Analytics Edge).
3. Then click on the Fields tab and add the page dimension so that you can export all landing pages that will appear as merchant listings in the SERPs.
4. Click the Filter tab and locate the Appearance field. Here you need to enter MERCHANT_LISTINGS, the search appearance code that we discovered earlier.
5. Then click on the “Data” tab and select the date range which is “Last 3 Months” for this tutorial.
6. I like to sort the data by clicks or impressions in descending order. For this example, use the drop-down menu, select Clicks, and then click Descending for the order.
7. Then click OK to export the data. Analytics Edge exports the data and displays a sample in green (the data is held in memory). To write all data to a worksheet, click File and then click Write to Worksheet.
Congratulations! You exported all the landing pages that were ranking in the merchant listings in the SERPs (and you exceeded the thousand-row limit in the GSC UI). You’ve also created a macro that can be reused at any time to quickly export dealer listing data for this property. This is why the API is so important and why Analytics Edge is such a great tool. You can simply reopen the table, open the task pane and run the query again.
Get Creative: Other Analytics Edge reports you can run on merchant listings:
It’s great that you exported all the product pages that ranked in the merchant listings, but you can do even more with Analytics Edge. Below are a few ideas:
- Quickly segment landing page data by category or directory. You can read my tutorial on creating intelligent delta reports to understand how to do this via Analytics Edge.
- Export the Queries Providing merchant listings for your website.
- Export both Queries And Landing pages together for dealer listings. Note that running this query may filter more data, but it is a great report that shows both the queries and landing pages together. Simply use a pivot table to better organize the data.
- After a major algorithm update, run a delta report to see the increase or decrease by landing page or query. Because you are using the merchant listing search experience, you will only see this data (to find out how an algorithm update may have impacted merchant listings).
- Check the indexing status of important product pages! You can follow my tutorial on how to create one Indexing monitoring system to check index status for pages ranked in merchant listings. You definitely want to know if some are deindexed for some reason (either by accident or by Google’s decision).
Summary: Bulk export of merchant listing data (beyond the 1K limit).
If you are an eCommerce merchant and are frustrated by the limited data in the GSC UI, using the Search Console API is the right choice. Analytics Edge is one of my favorite tools for exporting bulk data from GSC and I use it almost daily for a variety of tasks (and across APIs). And because you can string macros together in Analytics Edge, there are no limits to how you can use the data. Have fun.
GG