What Is Google Trends And How To Use It For Your Digital Marketing

This is the transcript from our new video so it may not read as well as a normal blog post would.

Hey. Right. Google Trends, what’s it all about? Basically, it just gives you information on what people have been searching for and how that has changed over time and if it becomes a trend. So if something is currently trending, like a sports event for example, if you pop that into Google Trends, it will give you demand or sort of interest in that topic over time. You can do it by topic. You can do it by search term. So it’s pretty useful.

A couple of examples. Let’s take Glastonbury Festival. So that’s something that happened quite recently, and every year you’ll see something sort of like this. So you’ll see demand for it go up the closer you get to line-up announcements and stuff like that. Then you’ll see it peter off as interest is diminished over time. Then the next year, up again, the next year, up again. Up again, up again, up again.

So you can use this for predicting things that might happen, but you can also use it to monitor changes in other things that are related loosely, let’s say.

So, as an example, let’s take something that goes hand in hand with a festival like Glastonbury — tent sales, for example. So if you have Glastonbury Festival going up and up like this, you’ll also see that tent sales do the same kind of thing. Is that because they’re both connected? Well, maybe. Probably it’s just a summertime, seasonal thing that you see that happen. However, if you go back far enough, you’ll see that Glastonbury Festival was off for a little while. They took a break. When that happened, this happened too. So you’ve got the same sort of peaks in interest for both Glastonbury and for tent sales, but both of them, you can see a noticeable drop-off in those. That’s kind of an interesting thing to see, because that kind of confirms that the two things are linked, as opposed to constantly seeing stuff go up and down.

Another example you could use is stuff like if you pop in “iced coffee” into Google Trends, you’ll see that every summer you get a similar uptick, and it’s quicker than for things like iced tea, so you’ll know that that’s a winning product and that’s the kind of thing that you want to be starting to sell at those points in time. Come the summer, everyone’s up for a bit of iced coffee over the hot stuff. So why not?

Just use Google Trends to see what happens, dependent on season, weather, it doesn’t matter. If you can think of it, just put it in Google Trends and see how people change their demand for those things depending on the time of year. If you can see something rising in popularity, like a big one at the moment, it’s on the front page is vegetarian foods, and hummus is kind of doing this, and everything else is just staying either level or growing very, very slowly. So if you want to invest in something, think about investing in hummus.

But yeah, it’s a pretty useful tool to try and figure out what people are up to and what they’re looking for depending on the season. So give it a try.

If you want to chat to me any more, you can follow me on Twitter, Google+, all that kind of stuff. I’ll be there and ready to have a talk. Thanks.