Google recently announced that it has four ways to help retailers move faster this holiday season, including new insights and shopping ads updates. The company noted that this year Black Friday falls five days later than last year, so the window between Thanksgiving and New Year’s is shorter than in other recent years.

The first thing Google announced is a new way for businesses to understand the most relevant shopping trends for their offerings. Users of the new Merchant Center will be able to explore shopping trends for retailers, which will show popular shopping queries, ranked by popularity and organized by topic and product.

"This means you can jump on viral moments, make better-informed inventory decisions and ensure your product descriptions use the same terms shoppers are," explained Jeff Harrell Senior Director, Merchant Shopping at Google. "Say you’re a specialty denim retailer thinking of putting away some surplus inventory of knee-length denim shorts that haven’t been taking off. The new trends insights in Merchant Center might show you that not only are ’denim Bermuda shorts’ surprisingly popular right now, but also people are actually using the words ’long denim jorts’ to find them. So now instead of pulling shorts off the shelf and back into storage, you can tweak your strategy to feature the shorts more prominently in campaigns — and of course, add ’jorts’ to the product description."

Secondly, Google announced the addition of two new generative AI insight features to the new Merchant Center to help users identify the insights they’re actually looking for. Generative AI-powered insight summaries will be visible at the top of the analytics tab, and these will show summaries of recent product performance. As Harrell explains, this will let you quickly catch up on "need-to-know" performance updates when you log in. You’ll also be able to see actions that can make a difference for your business, such as how clicks on products were up month-over-month, for example.

"We’ll also use AI to answer specific questions about your product data with new custom reports," he explained. "With a simple description of the data analysis you’d like to review — like, ’show me the performance of my best-selling dresses’ — we’ll produce a custom data set with the answers you care about. This tool uses generative AI to translate a user’s request into a custom report that highlights their own performance data. This means you can skip the process of building custom reports manually when you need something more tailored."

Google also announced more capabilities for merchants to streamline the management of local inventory ads. This lets shoppers easily see in-store product availability from shopping ads. Google will automatically sync in-store availability from your company’s website and integrate it into your Merchant Center account. This means less manual work

Finally, Google added new customer acquisition goals in Performance Max and Search campaigns so businesses can prioritize winning new customers before and during peak season. Profit goals can also be utilized to optimize campaigns. Additionally, there’s a new enhancement to brand exclusions, which lets you customize exclusions at the format-level for Search and Shopping ads to tailor when you show up on branded queries.

As the holiday shopping season rapidly approaches, businesses using Google’s tools owe it to themselves to utilize new features that can help them have a more successful season.