Google launches Think With Google: Rising Retail Categories
Earlier this month, Google announced the launch of a new tool on Think With Google: Rising Retail Categories. This comes at a time when searches for flour, baking utensils, board games and face masks are at an all time high. As more people are now searching online due to being at home more, Google saw an opportunity to give marketers some more insight.
This tool works like a product-oriented version of Google Trends, showing how search intent for different product categories has risen over time. Users can view a list of the top trending categories on a week-by-week, month-by-month or year-by-year basis for a given country, which is sorted by percentage increase.
To delve a bit deeper, they can also select a category to go further into which shows the top search queries for that category. This is useful to see how an increase in search interest can be driven by searches for a specific brand or product, particularly in the week-by-week data.
Talking about the tool, Google said, “It surfaces fast-growing, product-related categories in Google Search, the locations where they’re growing, and the queries associated with them. This is the first time we’ve provided this type of insight on the product categories that people are searching for”
The tool is extremely useful and can help retailers and marketers to understand trends more, especially in terms of geographic targeting. However, it is not without its cons. The tool uses a pure percentage increase figure but gives no indication of how much search interest there was on the topic before or how much there is now, which can make interpreting the data hard.
Overall, combined with other tools this free data could help marketers to understand where they should be focusing their efforts which could help them with anything from content creation to product creation. Google has pledged to keep updating the tool over the next few months, so we are yet to see how useful this tool might prove to be.
Whilst this is absolutely no substitute for proper product, keyword and competitor research, it is a great place to start identifying gaps and trends.
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