What Do Your Customers Want to Know Today?

Nilhan Jayasinghe

Google Trends is an exciting new tool that gives you the opportunity to see how search volumes for particular search terms have changed over time. Is it just a bit of fun or could you really learn more about your customers views? Nilhan Jayasinghe, Spannerworks' Head of Search has a play with Google's latest tool...

At first sight, Google Trends is a very pleasing piece of software that at the very least is going to give journalists a whole new source of data. For example, did you know that people from Sheffield are more likely to search on the term "mothers day" than people from any other city in the world? Imagine the 2,000 word Sunday paper articles that single fact could inspire. Hoards of journalists descending on Sheffield to investigate whether Yorkshire people are the most caring, family orientated folk in the world or simply the most forgetful.

But Google Trends actually offers a great deal and treated with a degree of healthy scepticism (to be explained later) could be a really useful online marketing tool.

Google Trends will take a search term (or terms) and show you how the volume of searches has changed over time. Lets take 'SLR camera' for example. Google Trends shows an interesting steady curve of enquiries with peaks around Christmas time. (see graph)

But Google Trends has much more up its sleeve, because it enables you to compare trends against other search terms. Putting in 'SLR camera, digital camera,' you can now compare the volumes between the two (see graph). The SLR camera search volume almost flatlines compared to searches for digital cameras.

What is also interesting is that this search has thrown up another feature of Google Trends. Each peak or trough is now labelled A, B, C, D etc and each one is referenced to a news article that was featured in Google news at that time. One of the peaks in this search is attributed to 'Fujifilm Boosts Digital Camera Lineup With The World's First Nine Megapixel Consumer Models', an article that appeared as a press release on July 28th 2005.

Now you can see the power of Google Trends. In one glance we can see seasonal levels of interest, news items that may have caused search volumes to increase and how popular a particular product, service or search term is in relation to others.

Other interesting elements include the ability to search on a particular month or on results for a particular country. Try searching on Wayne Rooney in April 2006 in the UK and see the 'metatarsal' peak. Then try searching on metatarsal and you see that news items about Steven Gerard in 2005 and Michael Owen in 2006 fuelled previous peaks and you also begin to see how addictive this could be.

The final part of the jigsaw is that Google Trends also gives you a lovely graph showing the areas where the most enquiries have come from. Delhi, Perth and Sydney are all top for searches against digital cameras; Mothers day that's Sheffield.

How could Google Trends help improve your search strategy?

First we must start with the caveats. Google itself prints a warning on the bottom of the search page that states: 'Google Trends aims to provide insights into broad search patterns. As a Google Labs product, it is still in the early stages of development. Also, it is based upon just a portion of our searches, and several approximations are used when computing your results. Please keep this in mind when using it.'

So with our healthy dose of scepticism in hand, it is still a great potential tool for search marketers and none more so in helping to look at what language people are using to search. Take our own industry. Search engine optimisation or SEO? Pop them both in Google Trends and you see that the term SEO has, over a two-year period, supplanted search engine optimisation as the most popular description of what we do (see graph). So optimising for SEO is going to be more effective than search engine optimisation.

Comparing 'shopping centre' with 'shopping mall', you find that worldwide, shopping centre just has the edge. Change your search to UK only, 'shopping centre' is significantly more popular; try US only and the results are reversed. Similarly, search on 'broadband', 'wi fi', 'adsl', and 'adsl' is significantly more popular as a search term worldwide. Go for UK only and 'broadband' is by far the most popular term.

Whatever industry you are in, there are invariably different ways of describing what you do, describing your products, and talking about your services. Google Trends now gives you a chance to check your assumptions about what is the most popular language and how that has changed over time.

Next steps

The next thing to do is to have a play. (Probably the safest thing you can do is to limit the time you will allow yourself to interrogate phrases, because like the first days of solitaire, you may find it quite addictive!) Choose terms significant to your business, plot them against similar terms and see how they compare. See significant news articles and consider whether these could inform your press relations strategy. Interrogate data by country or region to see if you need to change the language in your communications in different territories.

Do remember the warnings - it is trend data based on relatively small samples, but as an indication of language and as a source of invaluable facts for PowerPoint presentations at sales conferences, it'll be one that's here to stay.

Nilhan Jayasinghe is Head of Search at Spannerworks. For more information, visit www.google.com/trends or email nilhanREMOVE@spannerworksME.com

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