With only 120 days to go till Christmas, Google’s gearing up for the holiday marketing push, with a range of new updates for businesses using Google Merchant Center to link into Google Shopping listings.

First off, Google’s adding new product trend insights, which will highlight key shopping search and purchase trends in the app.

As you can see in this example, the new trend notes will highlight what’s popular at any given time, which could assist in your campaign planning.

As per Google:

“This means you can jump on viral moments, make better-informed inventory decisions and ensure your product descriptions use the same terms shoppers are. Say you’re a specialty 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 jorts” to find them.”

Note: Jorts are not trending, but they might be in future, and now, you’ll be able to jump onto trends like this based on data insights.

Google’s 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’s 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.”

Which is really the best use of the current AI tools available, in simplifying tasks that may require broader technical knowledge, or more manual effort, to implement. Of course, the difficulty then is that you’re probably less likely to spot or be able to correct errors in the data set, because you won’t know all the processes that have been put in place to create this overview. But even so, it could help to simplify the reporting process.

Google’s also improving its product availability notes on listings, via a new automated onboarding process, that’ll sync in-store availability from your website, and integrate it into your Merchant Center account.

Finally, Google’s also implementing new customer acquisition goals in Performance Max and Search campaigns, so you can better refine the targets for your Google campaigns.

These are handy updates, which will help you drive more performance from your Google Shopping listings. And with Google still a key source of product discovery, it’s worth using the info you have available to optimize your marketing performance.