What we track
The channels Trendmill captures, where each comes from and how fresh it is.
Trendmill captures five channels for every brand it tracks. Each item is screenshotted, read by AI for its offer, products, call to action, tone, layout and techniques, and stored with the brand.
| Channel | Where it comes from | Freshness |
|---|---|---|
| Marketing emails | Our own inboxes, signed up to each brand's mailing list | Within minutes of being sent |
| Meta ads | The Meta Ad Library, across Facebook and Instagram | Checked daily |
| Google ads | Google Ads Transparency, pinned to the brand's own account | Checked daily |
| Organic Instagram | The brand's public Instagram profile | Checked daily |
| Landing pages | The destinations of the ads we collect, captured in full | Checked daily |
Marketing emails
We sign up to each brand's mailing list with Trendmill inboxes and keep every campaign they send. Nothing lands in your inbox. For each email we record the subject, the sender, the plain-text body and a full screenshot, then read it for:
- The offer, in the brand's words, with the discount depth, any code and when it ends.
- The retail moment it's built around, such as EOFY, Click Frenzy, Black Friday or Boxing Day.
- The techniques doing the selling, such as countdown timers, scarcity or social proof. The full list is in How the numbers work.
Email is the channel every retail brand runs, so it is also the basis for the category benchmarks.
Meta and Google ads
Every ad carries a first seen and last seen date, and ads still live are marked as running. How long an ad has run is the best public signal that it's working. Neither Meta nor Google publishes what was spent, so days live is a hint, not a spend figure.
Near-identical versions of the same image ad are grouped into one card, so a test with forty copies reads as one ad with a +N count. Video ads are not grouped.
Google ads are pulled by the brand's own advertiser account rather than by searching its domain. That keeps out resellers and lookalikes bidding on the brand's name.
Organic Instagram
Every post on the brand's feed, with its likes and comments, read for its format, tone and the techniques behind it.
Landing pages
The pages a brand's ads send shoppers to, captured top to bottom and read for the sale mechanic and the headline offer.
What coverage means
Trendmill only knows about the brands it tracks. A brand we don't track is absent, not quiet. Brand pages and the Brands list show coverage plainly:
- Covered: we hold content for this brand.
- Awaiting first send: we've signed up, and nothing has arrived yet.
- No coverage: the brand is in our directory but we aren't capturing it. You can ask us to start. See Following brands.
A brand's history starts on the day we began tracking it. We don't backfill.