With only 120 days until Christmas, Google is gearing up for its holiday marketing push with a series of new updates for businesses that use Google Merchant Center to integrate with Google Shopping listings.

First, Google is adding new Product Trend Insights that highlight key search and purchase trends in the app.

As you can see in this example, the new trend notes highlight what’s popular right now, which can help you plan your campaigns.

According to Google:

“This means you can capitalize on viral moments, make better-informed inventory decisions, and ensure your product descriptions use the same terms shoppers are using. Let’s say you’re a specialty denim retailer and you’re thinking about clearing away some excess inventory of knee-length denim shorts that haven’t been doing so well. The new trend insights in Merchant Center might show you that not only are ‘denim Bermuda shorts’ surprisingly popular right now, but that people are actually using the words ‘long denim jeans’ to find them..”

Note: Jorts aren’t trending right now, but they might be in the future, and now you can jump on trends like these based on data insights.

Google is also integrating additional AI elements into its Merchant Center analytics, including summaries of recent product performance.

As you can see in this example, these new summaries give you insight into the products that are resonating most at any given time, as well as key trends that can help you prioritize your marketing efforts.

Google is also adding conversational queries to Merchant Center reporting:

“With a simple description of the data analysis you want to review – something like ‘Show me the performance of my best-selling dresses’ – we’ll create a custom dataset with the answers you’re interested in. This tool uses generative AI to translate a user’s query into a custom report that highlights its own performance data. This means you can skip the process of manually creating custom reports if you need something bespoke.”

This is really the best use of AI tools currently available to simplify tasks that may require more technical knowledge or manual effort to implement. The difficulty then, of course, is that you are probably less likely to be able to detect or correct errors in the dataset because you don’t know all the processes that were put in place to create that overview. But nonetheless, it could help simplify the reporting process.

Google is also improving its product availability information in listings via a new automated onboarding processthat syncs store availability from your website and integrates it with your Merchant Center account.

Finally, Google also implements Goals for acquiring new customers in Performance Max and Search campaigns so you can better refine the goals for your Google campaigns.

These are handy updates that can help you improve the performance of your Google Shopping listings. And since Google remains a key source for product discovery, it’s worth using the information available to optimize your marketing performance.