Why Google Trends is one of the best product research & eCommerce tools
Google Trends is a powerful tool for product research and eCommerce for one core reason: to ensure you move with demand, rather than against it.
Today we'll cover 5 core use cases of Google Trends for product research & eCommerce:
But first, it's worth understanding the advantages of using Google Trends as opposed to other tools. (If you aren't familiar with Google Trends, get up-to-speed before jumping into this guide.)
Advantages of Google Trends for eCommerce
There are many advantages to using this unique data set for eCommerce, including but not limited to:
Digital truth serum: Data from Google Trends captures genuine user interests and concerns that are not typically shared in surveys or other research. Many consumers say they’re more honest with Google search than with their own spouse. This provides unparalleled insight into what people truly care about, want, or fear—offering a raw, unfiltered view of consumer behavior.
Plenty of historical analysis: Access to over two decades of data allows for long-term analysis to get ahead of market shifts and align product strategy.
Real-time data: Conversely, it also provides up-to-the-minute data, helping you react quickly to emerging trends before they appear in other tools for time-sensitive opportunities.
Customizable queries: You can explore any keyword you're interested in, not just select terms that are pre-curated as is often the case with other trend analysis tools (e.g., Pinterest, TikTok).
Unrestricted queries: While Google Ads prohibits certain subjects like cryptocurrencies, alcohol, and medicine, Trends provides unrestricted access to all keywords. Many trend analysis tools only rely on Google’s Adwords API to gather search data and therefore miss opportunities.
Massive scale of data: Google processes trillions of searches annually, making the dataset extremely large and diverse. This also means there’s less bias towards a single demographic, so a given analysis is far less likely to be skewed.
In this guide, you'll learn how to capitalize on these advantages and apply this powerful tool to product research and eCommerce, beginning with how to use Google Trends to find trending products.
Use case #1: Find trending products on Google Trends
Whether you're a dropshipper looking for your first product, or an established brand researching the next addition to an existing catalog, Google Trends is invaluable to find trending products and validate demand before spending thousands of dollars developing anything.
For this guide, imagine you’re an apparel retailer deciding which product to add to your catalog. Since Google Trends is a search tool, the first decision you have to make is one you'll face again and again: Which keywords do you enter?
If you don’t have a specific product in mind, it’s best to start broad and narrow down based on the data. As an apparel store, you can begin by exploring different subcategories within apparel.
Generating subcategories
To determine which category to explore more deeply, use Google or an LLM with a prompt like, “top categories of apparel by fashion style.” Adding “by fashion style” helps filter out categories with limited growth potential, such as basic items like shirts or pants, which mainly fluctuate with seasonal demand.
With this prompt, ChatGPT provides the following categories:
Streetwear
Bohemian (boho)
Minimalist
Vintage/Retro
Preppy
Athleisure
Goth/Alternative
Casual/Everyday
High/Luxury Fashion
Glam/Party Wear
The next step is to look up each of these within Google Trends to find the most promising option. However, before doing so, you need to know what you’re looking for.
Try it yourself: Use your preferred method to generate a list of subcategories.
How to spot a trend
While many of the apparel subcategories that ChatGPT provided likely contain trending products, you ideally want a product whose greater category also shows long-term growth potential. This reduces the risk of choosing a short-lived fad and also allows room for future expansion.
Therefore, before diving into any particular subcategory, you need to know how to spot a promising trend.
After consistently spotting trends like TikTok, OnlyFans, pickleball, and others before they became the cultural movements they are today, we here at Glimpse have crystalized a few criteria in Google Trends results that indicate whether or not a topic is likely to continue growing exponentially.
Note: these graphs are from the Glimpse extension, which adds the absolute monthly volume, year-over-year growth, and a trend line that adjusts for both the seasonal and noise components.
Look for: Continuous increase in search interest over a multi-year time horizon, especially the past year:
Avoid:
Flatter trajectories like this can seem promising, but are unlikely to build enough momentum to start a meaningful wave soon:
“Rollercoasters” or momentary spikes like this are usually not organic growth, but rather impermanent boosts in interest from a media event or advertising campaign:
Narrowing your search
Now that you know what to look for, revisit your list of apparel subcategories.
Searching each subcategory on Google Trends and applying the above criteria, “luxury fashion” emerges as the most promising option, with a steady, long-term rise in search interest.
From here, you can identify specific products within the luxury fashion subcategory that are ripe opportunities, using the same approach as earlier and asking Google or an LLM like ChatGPT for subcategories with a prompt like, "subcategories of luxury fashion."
While this is a fine place to start, it's worth noting that this approach has some limitations to be aware of.
First of all, many Google results for searches on anything trend-related will be misleading, as media claims often prioritize novelty over accuracy. Additionally, LLMs like ChatGPT may:
Suggest incorrect terminology, leading to missed opportunities.
For example, GPT suggested “high fashion,” a category in steady decline, while “luxury fashion” has shown consistent growth. Always check multiple variations of a phrase before ruling it out.
Recommend topics that are actually declining as they don’t have a sense of scale or trajectory
Miss under-the-radar opportunities due to their design to produce average results
Hallucinate, or generate incorrect or misleading information
To address these issues, you could use social media to spot timely topics, but this method can be time-consuming and prone to fads.
Glimpse, an extension that enhances Google Trends, offers a simple and reliable method to spot emerging trends by tracking every keyword searched online, categorizing them, and then highlighting those with sustained growth.
For instance, here are the top 5 results for trending keywords within the Fashion & Apparel category, any of which could be ideal product opportunities.
While the focus of this guide is on Google Trends, we’ll reference Glimpse where relevant to highlight additional insights.
Assuming you don't have access to Glimpse, you can use ChatGPT to generate a list of subcategories to then view on Google Trends. This approach reveals that “luxury watch,” “luxury handbag,” “cashmere sweater,” and “loafers” are all promising options.
To determine which is the ripest opportunity, use the Compare feature to overlay search trajectories and compare relative volumes. Among these options, loafers win with the highest volume and growth, making them a strong candidate for a catalog.
Instead of manually comparing dozens of products within a category, you could also use Glimpse’s Related Trends feature, which automatically recommends trending keywords related to your exact keyword.
For instance, here are the results for “loafers”, which provide a number of other product opportunities to explore once done with loafers.
However, before moving on from loafers, you can pull key insights using Google Trends' other features, as well as find the specific variation of loafers that’s growing the fastest.
Try it yourself: Apply the trend criteria to your list of subcategories to find the most promising option, then repeat the process with products. Lastly, compare the top products to each other to find the ripest opportunity.
Pulling insights on a product
After identifying loafers as a product opportunity, Google Trends can provide additional insights so you can confirm it’s a fit before diving deeper.
This first thing you likely want to confirm is that demand is growing in your target market. Google Trends defaults to a worldwide view, but you can use the location filter to focus on your specific market (e.g. the US).
Demand does seem to be growing here, although the trajectory has flattened slightly in the past couple of years.
The graph also highlights significant seasonal variations in interest, with peaks in spring and fall and dips in winter and summer. Should you choose to introduce a loafer-related product, aligning your launch with these peaks in interest would be crucial.
If these seasonal patterns are hard to detect, Glimpse's Seasonality panel can help visualize them more clearly and understand what drives them.
If you want to know which regions within the US are the most interested in loafers, refer to the Interest by Region section, which shows Washington D.C. and New York as ranking the highest, making them ideal regions for further research or targeted marketing.
It’s important to clarify that this ranking does not reflect the total number of searches for loafers by region. If it did, the most populous regions would always come out on top.
Instead, the ranking is based on the percentage of loafer-related searches relative to all searches in that region; see our complete guide to Google Trends for a more detailed explanation.
If you do want to see which regions perform the most searches for loafers, then refer to the absolute volume by region within Glimpse to see that the US, India, UK, Philippines, and Canada are the largest regions.
If your market is flexible, then you can use this data to launch your product in whichever region is growing the fastest which, in this case, is the Philippines.
Try it yourself: Confirm interest is growing in your market, check for seasonality, and explore top regions to understand your product more deeply.
Finding the winning variation
Now that you’ve pulled some insights on loafers, it's time to pinpoint the highest-growth variation.
You can use an LLM again for ideation on search prompts and then compare results within Google Trends. The Related Queries section of the tool can also help, though results can be hit-or-miss and overlap with common search prompts.
After testing different variations in material, style, and demographic, you discover that “leather penny loafers for women” have the highest growth.
While this specific long-tail lacks enough search volume to visualize, by comparing related terms (e.g., “penny loafers men” vs. “penny loafers women” and “penny loafers leather” vs. “penny loafers suede”), you confirm it’s the leading variation.
To streamline this process, Glimpse’s People Also Search panel highlights the most common attributes people search alongside a product. These results provide a few more variations to explore, such as loafers with heels or tassels.
Lastly, you find that brands like Loro Piana, G.H. Bass, and Dr. Marten’s are trending upward. Identifying the common thread among these brands can help us better position the product to align with current consumer preferences.
Glimpse includes a “Brand” filter in the People Also Search panel to make this process easier, too.
Try it yourself: Search and compare variations on Google Trends to pinpoint your exact offer.
Conclusion to discover a trending product
And that’s it! Now that you have a winning variation, you can begin the process of understanding the competitive landscape and determine your positioning.
You can apply this systematic approach to any category, starting broad and progressively narrowing down to find the most in-demand product variation.
For example, if you followed the same steps in the "Home tech" category, you'd discover that searches for "doorbell cameras" have steadily grown since 2015.
Then, if using Glimpse's People Also Search or some other tool, you could uncover the variation "doorbell camera for RV,” which you could use to differentiate your product, craft creative ads, and optimize your SEO for a niche market.
Your imagination is truly the limit.
Now dive in and use Google Trends to discover your next winning product and, if you’re looking for even deeper insights, then sign up for the Glimpse extension to spot these trends before anyone else.
Use case #2: Optimize product listings with trending keywords
In addition to product research, Google Trends is excellent for helping optimize eCommerce listings with trending keywords.
As consumer needs change, new demand can emerge for existing products under different names. For example, searches for “LED light strips” hit a peak in 2020, but some retailers capitalized better than others.
As TikTok creators sought better lighting, a "new" product emerged: TikTok lights. Retailers who added TikTok-related keywords to their listings captured this surge, while others missed out on extra sales despite selling the same product.
Staying updated on how consumers talk about products is crucial—and Google Trends can help.
First, choose a keyword to investigate, such as “plush toy.” Then, type it in a regular Google search, followed by “vs” to see the auto-suggest recommendations.
“Stuffed animal”, “soft toy”, and “plushie” all seem like possible variations. You can repeat this process with the results to uncover even more variations, like “plushie.”
From here, first confirm they are the same thing by searching them on Google (they are), then compare their trajectories on Google Trends.
It seems that “plushie” is an increasingly common term, even topping searches for “stuffed animal.” As a retailer, if you weren’t aware of this, you'd miss an increasing number of sales every year, despite selling the same product.
With Glimpse, an extension that enhances Google Trends, this process is even easier. The Topic Map shows related topics, and the “Vs” section in People Also Search highlights the most common comparisons, helping spot opportunities to refine listings and capture more sales.
Try it yourself: Enter your core keywords into Google, followed by “vs”, and see what pops up. Then, compare search interest in those terms to your current terminology and ensure you have related variations in your product listings.
Use case #3: Benchmark internal performance
While internal analytics show how sales are doing, they don’t reveal performance relative to the overall market. To know this, you can compare Google Trends results with your internal data to determine if you're outperforming or underperforming market growth, which can inform product and marketing decisions.
For example, imagine you sell luxury watches. Begin by calculating the growth in search interest, entering "luxury watch" into Google Trends and setting the location to the U.S.
Eyeballing the graph, you gauge that Q3 2024 interest was an average of ~50, up from ~40 in Q3 2023—a growth of roughly 25%.
For more precise results, you could download the raw data and calculate the average interest from October 1, 2023, to September 30, 2024, and compare it with the previous years, giving values of 51.85 and 43.79 (or a 19% YoY growth).
To make this precise calculation easier, Glimpse provides a yearly, quarterly, and monthly growth rate for every query, along with absolute monthly search volume.
Once you have the market growth rate, you'd compare it to your own performance. For example, if your luxury watch sales are flat or up only 5% YoY, it indicates you’re underperforming. However, if sales are up 50%, it shows you’re outperforming the market and capturing demand more effectively than competitors.
Try it yourself: Calculate the search interest growth rate for your core products, then compare it against your internal sales data to benchmark your performance.
Use case #4: Manage inventory
Using Google Trends to guide inventory decisions can help retailers avoid costly mistakes. Here’s a scenario:
It’s November, and you notice candles flying off the shelves everywhere. Seeing this, you decide to invest heavily in stocking up on candles, anticipating strong demand. The problem? It takes two months to get the inventory, and by then, demand has dropped by 50%.
On the flip side, imagine you've been selling candles since March and expect demand to remain steady. Instead, demand more than doubles, and you sell out just before the peak in December—missing out on significant sales.
Try it yourself: Search your core products on Google Trends to measure their seasonality and more effectively plan inventory.
Use case #5: Inform catalog decisions
If you're unsure about restocking a slow-selling product, trend data can help.
If search interest in the product is rising, the issue might be with your positioning, quality, or lack of awareness. On the other hand, if the trend is declining, you might be better off reallocating resources to a different product.
Try it yourself: Search your slowest-selling product on Google Trends to determine if it is an internal or external issue.