When deciding on a marketing campaign, it often helps to know where the public sentiment lies. You may be considering popular websites or blogs to advertise on and deciding among magazines for print ads. Or, you may simply be curious as to what up-to-the-hour topics are holding the public interest. Either way, Google Trends (http://www.google.com/trends) makes discovering these topics easy.
With Google Trends, you can enter up to five topics separated by commas and see how often they’ve been searched for on Google over time. Google Trends also provides geographic regions where people have searched for those topics the most, and shows the frequency with which your topics have appeared in Google News stories. The results are displayed as a linear search-volume graph.
Hot Trends highlights searches that have sudden surges in popularity (it also thankfully filters out spam and removes inappropriate material). Hot Trends shows related searches, a search-volume graph, and the top cities for each search. In case you are wondering why a certain search term is enjoying a bump in popularity, Hot Trends returns news, blog, and web results, so you can monitor the conversations people are having online that are driving the surge. You can also choose a date in the past to see what the top Hot Trends for that date were.
Here is an example of a comparison I experimented with on Google Trends that gave some interesting results. I searched for “garden art, gnomes, birdbaths, birdfeeders.”
I learned that people search for “garden art” and “gnomes” roughly the same amount, and that they have declined in popularity also at roughly the same rate. Interestingly, the top regions for these terms were West Coast cities: Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Victoria, BC. If I sold garden gnomes, I would know that West Coast gardening magazines might be my target for advertisements. Birdfeeders and birdbaths were not relevant to those people searching for gnomes.
I separated the search terms with a vertical bar: “|” to see how many searches contained any of the four terms, which gave me similar results.
Again, only garden art and gnomes were relevant.
This is a valuable tool Google just unveiled this May. I think this is a must-have tool to explore before you make any advertising decisions.
