(image: https://www.superdream.co.uk/wp-content/oldblogs/2012/09/google-trends.jpg alt: google trends)
**Yesterday (link: http://insidesearch.blogspot.co.il/2012/09/insights-into-what-world-is-searching.html text: Google announced) that they were merging two of their search based products, with Insights for Search being absorbed into (link: http://www.google.com/trends/ text: Google Trends). **
These tools have been popular with marketers looking to get a feel for how their target market is searching for products, services or brands.
One of the most useful features is the graphs of ‘interest over time’. These give the relative numbers of people searching for a given term, going back to 2004.
Here are a few ideas for what you can use the Google Trends tool for:
1) Brand Popularity
Interested in finding out which are the most popular brands online? Google Trends can give you some useful information. In this comparison of online clothing retailers ASOS and Marks and Spencer it is clear that both have enjoyed an increase in users searching for them by brand name since 2004.
What is interesting is that Marks and Spencer have a very seasonal spike in searches before Christmas, whereas variations in demand for ASOS is less pronounced.
(image: https://www.superdream.co.uk/wp-content/oldblogs/2012/09/online-clothing-brands.jpg alt: online clothing brands)
2) Campaign Planning
Some products have particularly seasonal appeal. You can use Google Trends to predict when the largest number of your target audience are searching online and plan your advertising campaigns accordingly.
Here is a graph showing demand for the term ‘wedding cakes’. December shows a steep decline in demand followed by a peak of interest in January and February. The very start of the year is the ideal time to have your marketing campaigns in place to appeal to this target audience.
(image: https://www.superdream.co.uk/wp-content/oldblogs/2012/09/wedding-cakes.jpg alt: wedding cakes)
3) Product Research
An ecommerce store should be aware of how their products are going in and out of style. This can help with stocking products that people are most interested in buying. For example, if you had a specialist online guitar shop, you would be interested to see how demand for ‘bass guitars’ has dropped compared to ‘acoustic guitars’.
(image: https://www.superdream.co.uk/wp-content/oldblogs/2012/09/guitars.jpg alt: guitars)
4) Choosing Business Names
One of the best ways of building rapport with your target audience is to use the same language that they do. This is especially true when you name products and when writing copy. But what happens when there are 2 commonly used terms for the same product or service such as ‘chiropodist’ and ‘podiatrist’? Let Google Trends help you choose which is likely to be the most popular term with your audience.
(image: https://www.superdream.co.uk/wp-content/oldblogs/2012/09/podiatrist-chiropodist.jpg alt: podiatrist chiropodist google trends data)