Facing tighter digital media budgets even as consumers spend more time online than ever, marketers have a new tool to help them spend those fewer dollars more effectively.
Google’s new Rising Retail Categories lists the fastest-growing product categories based on what users search for. With the interactive tool a marketer can drill down by category, locale and week, month or year to see what’s trending and the top search terms being used.
For May, the top retail categories had a 200% increase over the month before. Topping the list are “Golf bag accessories.” By far, the top search query is “golf push cart” with the biggest volume of searches coming from Michigan, Illinois, California and New York.
For the week of Mother’s Day, greeting cards was the top retail search category and “happy mother’s day” the top increasing query.
Announcing the launch of the Rising Retail Categories, Google Product Manager Pallavi Naresh said that marketers have long used Google Trends to understand consumer interests and discover how they are changing. “Since COVID-19 began, we’ve heard from our retail and brand manufacturing partners that they’re hungry for more insights,” she said.
“But if they don’t know what to look for, there isn’t an easy way to understand which product categories are gaining in popularity, and might pose an opportunity,” Naresh said, explaining Google launched the new tool to make it easier for marketers and retailers to know at a glance what product-related categories are the fastest growing in search.
Marketers will still look to Google Trends for insight to products that don’t make the Rising Retail Categories list. Bigger businesses and marketers with more ample budgets also have numerous marketing services available to them, which a broader perspective and greater depth on consumer search and buying intent.
While the new tool is modest in the amount and type of product trend data it offers, it is one more tool in the toolbox the search giant’s ThinkWithGoogle provides for free, making it especially attractive to small businesses and tight-budget retail marketers.
Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash
