Topical Search Trends & AdWords

by Anna George on 16th May 2011

With all the recent activities in the news over the past few weeks (The Royal Wedding, Osama Bin Laden etc) this got us thinking about current news stories and search trends within Google. With breaking news, there would always be an increase in search traffic around that topic – would it make good business sense to then take advantage of this fact?

A great example in our industry who did just this in the past is Ann Summers, with their agency iCrossing they utilised current news stories and made sure their ads were visible. One being “budget 2010″ where they were the only visible paid advertiser. A similar strategy was implemented for the Chinese New Year (Year of the Rabbit) and the snow fall in 2010.

Ann Summers’ strategy here was to raise brand awareness – given the increase in search traffic around these particular topics, you would not automatically associate that particular brand with searching about the 2010 Budget. However with a cheeky reference to the recession and pleasure, attention is captured!

This raises the question, at what point is it unethical to capitalise on current news events. The most recent being search traffic around Osama Bin Laden, the below spike is only after a few days worth of search traffic:

As far as we can tell no advertisers are or were advertising on these keywords, but would it be worthwhile considering how much interest there is around this topic and how many people you could reach? Perhaps this particular topic is a little extreme.

A more reasonable recent event would be the Royal Wedding – did anyone jump on that? Look at the search trends below:

We can see a few advertisers took advantage of this spike; some you would expect to see (Royal Wedding coins for sale, memorabilia etc), but a few additional ones who you wouldn’t:

So think outside the box, if you’re interested in building brand awareness then sometimes it pays to be a little reactive and daring!