Google adds tools to help retailers capture shopping trends

Google is ramping up its efforts to support businesses ahead of the holiday season. The tech giant has announced several new updates to its Google Merchant Center, aimed at enhancing product visibility and boosting sales through Google Shopping.

One of the key updates includes the addition of product trend insights. These insights will provide businesses with real-time data on shopping search and purchase trends, helping them to identify what’s popular and adjust their marketing strategies accordingly.

“This means you can jump on viral moments, make better-informed inventory decisions and ensure your product descriptions use the same terms shoppers use. Say you’re a speciality denim retailer thinking of putting away some surplus inventory of knee-length denim shorts that haven’t been taking off. The new trends insights in Merchant Center might show you that not only are “denim bermuda shorts” surprisingly popular right now but also people are actually using the words “long denim shorts” to find them.” said Google 

Google is also bringing more AI elements to its Merchant Center analytics, including summaries of recent product performance.

As you can see in this example, these new summaries will give you insight into the products that are gaining the most traction at any given time, as well as key trends that can help you prioritize your marketing efforts.

Google is also adding conversational queries to Merchant Center reporting “With a simple description of the data analysis you’d like to review - like, “show me the performance of my best-selling dresses” - we’ll produce a custom data set with the answers you care about. This tool uses generative AI to translate a user’s request into a custom report that highlights their own performance data. This means you can skip the process of building custom reports manually when you need something more tailored.”

Google is working on improving its product availability notes on listings,using a new automated onboarding process which will sync in-store availability from the users website into the Merchant Center account

Google is also implementing new customer acquisition goals in Performance Max and Seearch campaigns, which will help in better refining the targets for Google campaigns

These handy updates will help drive more performance from Google Shopping listings and Google being one of the key sources of product discovery, it is worth using the info which already exists to optimize marketing performance