What is Google Trends?

May 11th, 2006 Jackie

Google announced the release of Google Trends today, prompting a fellow search geek to advise me to “blog the news” as quickly as I can. So here it is folks! Google Trends has been launched. WOO HOO!

Okay, so what is it and how does it benefit my clients?

Google Trends, as defined by Google, enables you to “compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics.” The tool also, “displays how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and which geographic regions have searched for them most often. “

Sounds pretty cool - so I gave it a try. Many of the campaigns I work on are health-related, so I typed in “pelvic pain” and “endometriosis” as my first simultaneous search. The graph I got showed me that a lot more people search on the former term and that the highest search volume comes from two locations in India. The third highest volume comes from Chicago in the U.S. (where my client is located).

Can this help campaign strategizing in any way? Well, my feeling is that it doesn’t really provide a lot of useful information on campaigns I’m already working on - I have mountains of data from these campaigns and I know what keywords are working. Although the info about India is certainly interesting, as are the handful of articles about endometriosis.

Where I really see this tool helping me is in the preliminary research phase of an online marketing campaign. At least, I’ll know that more people are searching for “eczema” than they are for “toe fungus” over the past two years - and believe me, that looks great all graphed up in a PPT presentation! (the trends not the toe fungus).

The best part of the service (in my opinion) are the links to the articles which appear next to the trend chart. It’s very interesting to see news stories that correspond with spikes in search activity, and it seems like a good way to quickly get some background information on a given topic.

Entry Filed under: Newsworthy