Shopping Insights is the first tool that is able to unlock Google’s enormous amount of shopping search data for retailers around the country, helping them uncover trends and insights about how consumers shop for their products.

Colorful material design-inspired visualizations let retailers explore their products in depth. Users can view trends nationally, regionally, or in specific cities and towns, and can even see how these trends affect local shopping malls. They can also view consumer searches by customizable timeframes including popular shopping holidays such as Mother’s Day, Black Friday, and the Holiday season. At any point the user can also apply a device filter to see a breakdown of how consumer shopping behaviors change between mobile and desktop.

Shopping Insights also features interactive shopping stories that bring unique data insights to life. From the rise and fall of the hoverboards to the battle of the consoles, the stories introduce new audiences to the tool while teaching them how to uncover their own product insights.

Retailers can search from thousands of products to discover how their customers are shopping. Each product comes to life on an interactive map and timeline, showing users how shopping trends change across location and time.

Shopping Insights also highlights unique product stories as they emerge. Each story features interactive data visualizations that allow retailers to dive deeper into seasonal topics and fast- rising products.

For example, one story shows how local weather trends influence product searches in California. This story revealed that when rainfall levels increased dramatically in cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco in January due to El Niño, interest in Hunter boots increased significantly as well.

These types of insights help retailers understand how to meet local demand for products and adjust their inventory levels by location accordingly.

Since its launch in the Fall of 2015, Shopping Insights has become one of the most successful tools on Think with Google. Retailers and the press alike have celebrated the tool, including coverage by the Wall Street Journal, LA Times, TechCrunch and more. This positive feedback has prompted Google to continue to add more products to the database and to add more data visualization features and stories to the site to support retailer needs.

Shopping Insights unlocks the power of Google Shopping search data for retailers around the country, helping them uncover trends and insights about how consumers shop for the products they carry. Retailers can explore products by geography, time, and device in Material Design-inspired visualizations, and view interactive shopping stories that bring unique data insights to life. By better understanding users’ shopping intent online, retailers can make more informed local merchandising and marketing decisions for their stores.

Shopping Insights estimates popularity and trends for a given product by aggregating keyword data from the billions of searches consumers are performing while researching and shopping for products. Going a step further than existing search trends tools, Shopping Insights combines relevant queries to provide reliable insights about products. For example, queries like Playstation 4, PS4, Playstation 4 price, Sony PS4 are all aggregated together to estimate the interest in the gaming console Sony Playstation 4.

This aggregation is distilled into 5,500 of the most popular products for retailers to explore, with more on the way.

In today’s connected world, 87% of shopping research happens online, yet 92% of goods are still purchased in stores. Many of these shoppers turn to Google to research products before they buy them, and Google wanted to make this shopping data more useful and accessible for retailers to help them connect with their consumers’ needs. The goal was to help retailers uncover insights about local shopping behaviors, understand demand for popular products across the country and ultimately influence local inventory and marketing decisions.