360DigitalInfluence

One of the most useful free tools out there is Google Trends and I’m continually surprised by the innovative ways I see it used by my colleagues. Beyond the obvious function in SEM and SEO campaigns, the half of all internet users who are starting their session with a good Google must be giving use some other useful information. Google showcased this recently with their Flu Trends project and it got me thinking about other ways to bring the line graphs to life. Here are some of my favorite examples (including Quail Man) of interesting Google Trends and I ask you to add your own ideas and provide links in the comments.

A recent Penn State study found that 80 percent of searches are informational, where people are looking for a specific fact or topic, and from this it’s not hard to imagine Google Trends as a peek into our national consciousness. This voyeurism can inform campaigns beyond the search engine- and can also be pretty fun if you’re a social media geek.

The essential element of Google Trends is the blue line showing the volume of a search term over time as it compares to the overall search volume (correcting for the overall increase in Google searching). The Subregions function and News Index are also useful in their own right.

Volume Over Time

In the digital PR world we are always looking for new ways to measure the success of our campaigns and the Volume/Time graph is a great way to do this. For example, look at the volume of US searches for “Lenovo” over the past year. There is a slight increase until August when they rolled out a campaign based on their sponsorship of the Summer Olympics; in August their is a spike followed by a more dramatic increase than pre-Olympics. This is one indicator of the success of the campaign since one of Lenovos main objectives was to introduce their brand to American consumers.

Volume/Time can also show you the best timing to launch a campaign. The next one is not a huge shock but check out the trend for “personal budget”. Budgeting is much more top of mind around the New Year so maybe a New Year’s resolution based campaign would strike a cord with consumers.

Now don’t ask me why I thought to look at the Google Trends for Quail Man, Doug Funny’s famous alter-ego, but I did. Look at the dramatic spike every October. Why? Halloween costumes of course!

Subregions

Subregions show you where the largest search volumes are coming from. This can inform off-line engagements and paid advertising, especially when the top subregions are not the largest population centers.

For example the top subregions for “burger recipes” are all in the mid-west, so you might look to have a blogger barbecue in the Chicago area instead on New York City or reach out to blogs in the mid-west with a barbecue-themed campaign.

Another fun one to explore is searches for the term “blogs.” The #2 subregion between New York state and Oregon is Washington DC, interesting given its relative size to entire states. I can only imagine this reflects frantic politicians, staffers, and lobbiest searching for the term “blogs” to try and figure out what the heck their interns keep talking about.

For more on interesting subregions check out this post where BNet explained why Salt Lake City is often #1 or #2.

More

In closing, my favorite useless Volume/Time graph is the dramatic rise in the searches for “funny cats.” Also notice the drop every summer, maybe because kids are out of the middle school computer lab?

Please add your own interesting Google Trends below!

For more info on Google Trends check out their about page.