Seasonality Analysis Tool
Seasonality Analysis can be a great way to either begin planning your targeted campaign structure and budgeting or to re-evaluate your current structure and strategies. We use this type of analysis to help uncover untapped opportunities as well as to maximize high performance areas in our accounts. There are always a million ways you can cut up your data, but we found this to be a fairly templated approach (to start) that allows for your own unique customizations. This template combines two tools you are likely already using: your data feed, to help group your products into aggregate categories, and your Google Analytics data to evaluate performance. Put the two together and you have a great starting point from which to build a year-round strategy. Here is how.
How To Use Inflow’s Google Shopping Seasonality Tool
The video below is hosted on YouTube. If you need assistance with viewing the video, please contact info@goinflow.com.

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Instructions
In order to use this report, you will need access to the following:
- Google Merchant Center
- Google Analytics
We recommend using Google Merchant Center in order to pull ID data because your shopping campaigns are either structured using these IDs or their corresponding product categories.
Organizing this data by categories from your Merchant Center account will then make it a lot easier for your optimizations.
We also recommend this as many accounts might not have Enhanced Ecommerce setup and therefore could be missing product categories in their Google Analytics or they could be using it and the result may be too granular or differing from your Merchant Center structure.
In order to pull Seasonal Data, please do the following steps:
- Login to your GMC account, select Products on the left-hand bar, then Feeds. Select your feed, then click on the three dots next to Fetch Now in the left corner. You’ll see an option* to Download File and select it.
*Not all feed setups have the option to download a file. If this is not the case, find the source of your file in order to get the latest copy of your upload. - Open download. It is most likely a text file, so you will want to open it in Excel (or copy + paste it into an Excel sheet).
- From the Feed download, copy these two columns: ID & Google Product Category* *For the category column, you want to match up with how you organize and track your ecomm categories. You may use Custom Labels instead, for example, and if so, insert those instead.
- Paste the ID and Google Product Category data in the Data Feed Entry sheet in the workbook
- In the third column, copy down the formula in cell C3. This will give you your base category that you will copy later.
- In Google Analytics, navigate to Conversions, Ecommerce, then Product Performance.
- Select Product SKU as your Primary Dimension and ‘Month of the year’ as your Secondary Dimension
- Determine the timeframe you want to review. We recommend a minimum of one year and prefer 3 years in order to understand multiple year trends. Select the timeframe in GA and Export (download).*Check for Sampled Data. You may have to break up your timeframe into multiple lengths and download to avoid sampling and to get accurate data
- Open your exported product performance data and copy the following four columns: Product SKU, Month of the year, Product Revenue & Unique Purchases
- Paste the above data in the first four columns in the Google Analytics Data sheet in this workbook
- In the Google Analytics Data sheet, copy down the third cell in columns E, F & G.Now you have your data!
- To view seasonality by Month (what % of product revenue per category in that given month), in the Seasonality Review – By Month sheet in this workbook, select cell B3 and C + P the formula in across all months (to the right) and for all categories (down).
- To view the seasonality of a given category (what % of product revenue for that category sold in each month in a year), in the Seasonality Review – By Category sheet in this workbook, select cell B3 and C + P the formula in across all months (to the right) and for all categories (down).Now you have your seasonality data!
Note: There may be product discrepancies including, SKU changes (i.e. no longer in the feed, SKU changed, etc.). If this is the case, you may want to find old SKU lists or downloads and upload those as well. For products without a matching SKU, they will be listed as ‘No Category.’ However, you can look to this data as a guide. Even with substantial No Category data, the trends of the existing categories may be really valuable. Lastly, we recommend downloading this data and creating graphs. This can help you visualize trends.