Use Google Shopping Insights for market research

- [Announcer] Hey and welcome to another episode of Marketing Tips. I'm Brad Batesole and today, I want to show you a great way to identify trends and insights regarding shopping online. Now it's no surprise that Google is the first place that shoppers go to when they're looking to discover new brand, product, or do research. And fortunately, they've compiled all of this data in their Think With Google program and developed what they're calling Shopping Insights. And you'll get here at shopping.thinkwithgoogle.com. So to show you how powerful this is, let's say that we're going to do a search for backpacks. Perhaps I own an e-commerce storefront selling backpacks and need to understand when I should be buying ads, who my audience is, what the top products I should be selling are and what seasonality looks like. Google has this all for you in this one platform. So right away, I can see they've selected the last 30 days and they're showing me searches over time. Now we could also select from the drop down a shopping season, in this case, the holiday season is coming up. So I can select the holiday season and I can see when the searches are going to peak during this date range. So here we can see that the trend actually declines the closer that we get to the December 25th holiday as well as the New Year but things peak right around Thanksgiving in the United States which coincides with Black Friday and Cyber Monday, two of the biggest shopping days. You can also toggle between mobile and desktop to see how these trends change. As I scroll down, you get access into the top brands. Here I can see that Osprey, The North Face, Tumi, and Herschel Supply Company make up the most popular backpack brands. You can also filter by location. This can help you as you identify bid modifiers or even to see if you should stock particular products for particular regions. As I scroll back to the top, we can also compare this. So perhaps we're comparing backpacks to jackets. As we can see, jackets indicated by the red line, are far more popular than backpacks indicated by the blue line. You can also drill in so I can drill in to The North Face and add that as a comparison. Let's say I want to compare The North Face versus Herschel Supply. I'm going to simply remove by selecting the pencil icon and then the trash can those two other queries. Now we can see how these compare. So they follow the same search patterns but we can compare the interest by location. So I see The North Face is very popular in Massachusetts and California but Herschel is incredibly popular in Hawaii and New York. What I may do with that data is decide I'm going to run Google ads promoting the Herschel products for my storefront in Hawaii and New York with high bid modifiers. With The North Face, I'm willing to bid more in Massachusetts and California. This allows me to have a competitive advantage by adjusting that advertising strategy by location I can save a little bit of money, potentially get a better click-through rate and therefore, have a higher ROI. I encourage you to check out Shopping Insights if you're running an e-commerce storefront or simply want to gather market research. Thanks for checking in. As always, I'd love to hear from you. So follow my on Twitter via @bradbatesole or on LinkedIn.