Keeping Up With The Google Trends

Google Trends amasses a massive amount of data on a daily basis, making it a treasure trove of information on local consumer behaviour. Leveraging this vast volume of information can help digital marketers and business owners more accurately gauge movements in their respective industries, such as what is popular among consumers, or which products or brands require an update or a major overhaul.

Google Trends comprises information accumulated through the search engine giant’s database of queries – about 20 petabytes of information every day – presenting digital marketers a valuable opportunity to take advantage of this massive data.

There’s no need to worry if you’re new to using Google Trends, as its interface is user-friendly and easily navigable – all you have to do is enter your query on the search box provided at the top of the page. To optimise your search, you can break it down into the following:

Region

Specify your search according to geographic location (e.g., worldwide or by country)

Time Frame

Google Trends gives you the flexibility to analyse trends within the past week or just the last 60 minutes, or even throw it back to one month or one year ago. You can even access trends as far back as 2004.

Categories

Narrow down your search to categories such as Business, Entertainment, Health, Science/Tech, Sports, and Top Stories. In the Explore section of Google Trends, you can trim down the categories further to Arts & Entertainment, Beauty & Fitness, Books & Literature, Business & Industrial, and more.

Engines

Choose the appropriate search channel: Web Search, Image Search, News Search, Google Shopping, and YouTube Search

Google Trends will generate two results illustrated in graphs: Interest over time and Interest by region.

Found the information you need? Get a soft copy of the raw data provided by Google Trends by exporting it into a CSV file. Click the Actions Menu in the top right-hand corner of the result box, and click ‘CSV’.

As an example, I’ve keyed the search terms AdWords, SEO, Social Media, and Email Marketing to evaluate their interest in the United Arab Emirates from 2011 up to the present.

Looking at the graph, we can deduce that Social Media has significantly overtaken AdWords and SEO in terms of popularity, whereas interest in AdWords and SEO have experienced slow growth from November 2011 to date. Email marketing, on the other hand, continues to be the least popular topic.

Make Google Trends work for you

Google Trends enables you to forecast the popularity of products, services, and brands – a feature that can help you determine which is, or which will be, the more lucrative product or service. Let’s take a look at some of the most popular car brands and manufacturers in the UAE for the past year.

If I were a car dealer or rental provider, I will make sure to have Mercedes and Ferrari vehicles in my car dealership, as they are the most searched automobile brands for the past 12 months.

Take note, however, that the data shown by Google Trends are not absolute numbers. Instead, it illustrates the relevance of your search terms and compares them with one another. The numbers you can see are data points that have values ranging between 0 to 99. The most relevant region, most important search query, and the highest point have a value of 100.

Google Trends is one of the most powerful online tools that can help us determine what our target audience is interested in, and what they will be interested in. As this is just the tip of the iceberg of Google Trends’ capabilities, try to explore and play around and you’ll discover the numerous possibilities you can interpret its data-driven insights.