We’re in the midst of the biggest and busiest shopping season of the year. Consumers are using search to help them determine which brands and products to purchase. To help you see brand, product-specific or other category trends, Google initially launched the Google Shopping Insights tool in 2015 with 5,000+ products. Recently, the tool has been updated to include more than 55,000 products, 45,000 brands and 5,000 categories, making it a robust and powerful learning tool.

Let’s take a more in-depth look at Google Shopping Insights.

Google Shopping Insights Tool Overview

At the Shopping Insights page, enter in a category, product or brand.  If you’re not sure what you want to look at, click in the search box and the default list of categories will pop up.  Keep clicking through to get into the sub-categories.

Once you select the category, you’ll you see information like what is shown below, which outlines trends over time, top brands in the categories and interest by location.

From the toolbar on the left, you can change the date range, which helps to get a higher level view and trends over a longer period of time. You can select particular geographies in the US only for select metros, all states or the entire US.

Lastly, you can also select certain peak shopping times, which is helpful so that you don’t have to look up the specific dates for occasions that don’t have a set date each year, such as Mother’s Day or Black Friday,

You can also add other brands, categories or products to compare one to another to see how each fared over time. In the example below, you can see how Educational Toys and Activity Toys categories had a similar trend leading up to Black Friday, but Educational Toys peaked and Activity Toys plummeted on Cyber Monday.

This information can be downloaded to be included in reports or sent to clients. You can also “subscribe” to the report and it will be emailed to you. You can sign up for up to 10 weekly or monthly reports as well as reports on all popular products, trending products and other updates to the Shopping Insights tool.

How to Use the Reports

There are many ways you can use these reports.  Here are a few ideas:

• Compare your top product over the corresponding competitor product
• See how brands compare in any given category
• Determine if you should shift focus to particular geographies or devices based on search volume
• Monitor trends for your product, category or brand (or your competitor’s)
• Compare how your product is fairing versus your entire brand or category
• Identify past peak trends so you can plan accordingly for the potential repeats

The key is to keep playing around with the tool to find what is most helpful to you and your business.  If you are looking for specific ways to impact your PPC shopping campaigns, check out our tips on boosting Shopping campaign performance.

How have you used the Shopping Insights tool? Which reports have you subscribed to that you find the most helpful? Comment below to share!