Dive Brief:
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Google, or, more accurately, Alphabet, Tuesday unveiled a new Shopping Insights tool to better help retailers leverage search in more than 16,000 U.S. cities.
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The tool covers more than 5,000 products and counting on sale through its shopping ad service, according to the announcement, unveiled at the Wall Street Journal’s WSJDLive tech conference.
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The tool allows retailers to discover which items are popular in a given area at a given time. For example, the popularly of movie tie-in merchandise for Halloween shifted from the Minions to Star Wars in some areas of the country.
Dive Insight:
This Shopping Insights tool allows retailers to swiftly shift advertising and merchandising thanks to information that comes in more readily and better adjusted to local phenomena. The Shopping Insights tool aggregates interest for a product from search terms and has become increasingly sophisticated and therefore more valuable for retailers.
It’s the kind of data leveraging that is key for retailers with brick-and-mortar stores, but can be useful in advertising and personalization efforts for all retailers.
The news comes as it becomes increasingly important to Google to refine its tools as many consumers shift to using Amazon, rather than search engines, to find the best product information and descriptions, according to Jason Goldberg, digital marketing firm Razorfish VP of commerce who also blogs at Retail Geek.
Amazon’s search reach is bigger than many may realize, with more (44%) shoppers searching for products on Amazon than on search engines (34%) or retailers’ sites (21%), according to research from big-data marketing company BloomReach. That’s a big jump from three years ago, when Forrester Research pegged Amazon’s search at 30%.
“For a lot of people who want to do product research online you go to Amazon because they have information about every product in the world,” Goldberg told Retail Dive. “So Amazon has a huge head start, and that’s how Amazon becomes the online shopping destination.”
To minimize that advantage, retailers must leverage their search capability from Google or elsewhere to refine their inventories and marketing efforts.
