New insights for the holidays and beyond

Two years ago, we created the Insights page to help you keep up with changing consumer behavior at the height of the pandemic. As the reality of the pandemic has evolved, new challenges like inflation and rapid shifts in consumer preferences have followed. This has made it more difficult than ever for retailers to balance their merchandising and inventory with fluctuating demand during this busy holiday season. The Insights page can help: featuring just-in-time trends and forward-looking insights, this tool can be used for more than just optimization — it can help you navigate these issues and inform your broader marketing strategy.

We’re committed to giving you the insights you need to be successful this holiday season and beyond. That’s why, to make it even easier for you to understand your customers and drive performance, we’ve recently rolled out four new features on the Insights page: search terms insights, asset insights, audience insights and change history insights.

Search terms insights help you quickly understand what your customers are searching for without having to examine every individual search term. By grouping these terms into broader, intent-based categories, you can easily identify which themes are most popular with your customers along with metrics like conversion performance, search volume and search volume growth.

For example, let’s say you're an online sporting goods retailer getting ready for the last few weeks of the holiday season. You may find that you’re seeing strong interest in the search category "trail running shoes." You can use this insight to update your image assets to feature more outdoor locations, change your website to include more hiking content and even make inventory decisions to stock more of that product line for a last-minute holiday sale.

Asset insights help you learn more about the creative assets that resonate with your potential customers. This is an easy way to identify highly-engaged audiences, and can be used to inform the assets and landing pages you create for these groups, or even shift your entire marketing and product strategy. Using our previous sporting goods retailer example, you might see that bicycle-related image and video creative resonates with “Green Living Enthusiasts.” Based on this insight, you can pair these assets with a landing page that prominently features your sustainability efforts, or go one step further and use the insight to build out a completely new product line.

Audience insights, recently released at the account level, help you understand the characteristics of the people who engaged with your business. These insights give you a better idea of what your customers care about, making it easier to tune your creative for their unique interests and traits.

Online streaming platform discovery+ is a great example of how to put this type of insight into action. By using audience insights on the Insights page, the brand found that romance and TV drama fans were more likely to engage with their ads. In response, discovery+ changed its overall creative to focus on rom-coms, reality TV shows and other programming that directly catered to these interests. After pairing this insight with Performance Max campaigns, the brand saw a 17% incremental lift in subscriber growth.

Change history insights help you identify how changes you’ve made in your account may impact performance. When there’s a significant shift in your campaign’s key metrics, this insight can help you find out which changes you made that may have caused this shift in performance — and then figure out how to proceed.

These insights are now available globally, and are just a few of the tools you can use on the Insights page to better understand your customers and performance. For more holiday-focused trends, check out the Google Shopping Holiday 100 — our annual list of predictions for the most popular categories and products in the U.S. over the holiday season.

Visit your Insights page today to check out these insights and other trends that are relevant to your business.