Consumer behavior has changed dramatically ever since the start of the COVID-19 lockdown began. Needs-driven spending has been replaced discretionary spending and online shopping has supplanted in-store buying. As local economies and retailers begin opening back up, this could change again.
With the pandemic, Google says that product search is an area that is always changing and always evolving. Because of this, the company is introducing Rising Retail Categories within the ThinkWithGoogle domain Google said, in a blog post. In the post, it said “we’ve heard from our retail and brand manufacturing partners that they are hungry for more insights on how consumer interests are changing, given dynamic fluctuations in consumer demand.”
Similar to Google Trends, Rising Retail Categories exposes “fast-growing, product-related categories,” their associated queries and the geographic areas where product categories are trending the most. Google adds, “This is the first time we have provided this type of insight on the product categories that people are searching for.”
A drop-down menu allows users to see top-trending products by queries by week, month or year. Data is available for the US, UK and Australia, and according to Google, will be available every day.
Google offered a number of use cases for the data in the blog posts, such as content creation, promotion and product development. Although limited, the data will be interesting.