Google Adds New Trend Prediction Tools, Personalized to Your Business, to Google Ad Insights

Google is adding some new predictive elements to Google Ads insights, which will utilize both machine learning and historical data to predict likely consumer trends in your niche.

The new trend predictions are still in beta, and as noted, are available on the Insights page in Google Ads. But they could end up being significant additions for your planning, depending on their accuracy.

First off, Google’s testing demand forecasts, which will provide estimations of likely search interest for your products over the coming six months, by combining machine learning with past seasonal search trends.

As explained by Google:

“Let’s say you’re a beauty retailer. You might see a prediction that search interest in “perfumes & fragrances” will start to trend in the middle of November with an increase of 27%. Interest then peaks to 93% on Black Friday and tapers off in the following weeks. To help you understand this forecast, you’ll see trendlines for predicted search interest, actual search interest, and your clicks (the amount of traffic you’ve already received from this trend).”

Again, a lot depends on how accurate these predictions are, and how honed in they can be, based on your specific offerings. But with historic search traffic data as the base, they could well be strong indicators of coming shifts, which could provide valuable guidance for your marketing planning and strategy.

Google’s also testing a new consumer interest insight element, which will aggregate the top-performing search query themes that are driving performance in your campaigns.

As you can see here, the consumer interest insight report shows the number of people who are searching for each theme, the overall growth of each element, and provides performance recommendations for your account.

Again, that could be hugely valuable in mapping a better strategy, dependent on the data available, and how accurately it reflects rising trends. Which, over the last two years, would likely have been difficult, with so many consumption habits changing. But over time, you would expect that such predictions could well be indicative of shifting focus and behavioral indicators

Lastly, Google’s also testing audience insights, which aims to provide more info about the interests of your customers, including what creative they’re responding to.

That, again, could provide indicative data to help maximize your campaigns, with more specific info on what’s working in your Google Ads efforts.

It’ll take some time and experimentation to get right – and Google does, again, note that all of these elements are in beta, so they’re still working out the best way forward on each aspect. But they may well end up being powerful tools for your ad targeting and audience understanding efforts.

Google says that these elements will be launched in Google Ads over the coming weeks, while you can check out the Insights page on Google Ads now to view the latest trends for your business.