In the coming weeks, users of the new Merchant Center globally will be able to explore shopping trends for retailers. This feature shows popular shopping queries, ranked by popularity and organized by topic and product. For example, if you're a specialty denim retailer, the new trends insights might reveal that 'denim bermuda shorts' are popular and that people are using the term 'long denim jorts' to find them. This allows you to make better-informed inventory decisions and ensure your product descriptions use the same terms shoppers are searching for.

Soon in the U.S., two new generative AI insights features will be added to the new Merchant Center. First, generative AI-powered insight summaries will appear at the top of the analytics tab, showing summaries of recent product performance. This helps you quickly catch up on performance updates and see actionable insights, like a 20% increase in clicks on denim products. Second, AI will be used to answer specific questions about your product data with new custom reports. By describing the data analysis you need, such as 'show me the performance of my best-selling dresses,' a custom data set will be generated to highlight your performance data.

The new automated onboarding process for local inventory ads will automatically sync in-store availability from your website and integrate it into your Merchant Center account when setting up campaigns. This reduces manual work and provides a more convenient, up-to-date shopping experience for customers. This feature will begin rolling out for Local Inventory Ads accounts.

Google Ads has introduced new and expanded solutions to help advertisers attract new audiences and build seasonal creative faster. You can set new customer acquisition goals in Performance Max and Search campaigns to prioritize winning new customers. Additionally, you can optimize Performance Max and Standard Shopping campaigns with profit goals, now available in beta, to focus on increasing profit with cart-level conversions and cost of goods sold in Merchant Center. A new enhancement to brand exclusions allows you to customize exclusions at the format-level for Search and Shopping ads, tailoring when you show up on branded queries with greater precision.