As marketers, we are always trying to come up with stories or explanations for performance changes or trends in our campaigns. Gaining information about real world trends or events can more fully prepare us to talk about past performance or even about future strategies. This is where Google’s “Insights for Search” can come in handy.
Google’s statistical team has compiled data from their own search resources and from various economic sources and have built a tool designed to research changes or trends in the real world and match that to your own data or search terms. For example, if we research the keyword “flowers”, we see there is an overall slight decrease in search volumes year over year. Within each year we can also pinpoint months in which there are dramatic spikes in search volume, notably in February (Valentine’s Day) and May (Mother’s Day). Search marketers can use this information to plan for future strategies around these months while perhaps leaning back a little during the non-peak times.
Beyond this basic research foundation lays another very interesting and related tool for search marketers, Google Correlate. Google Correlate is a tool that allows anyone to find patterns in search volumes that correspond with real world trends. For example, if we are looking at the keyword “diet tips”, we should expect other search terms like “healthy diets” and “exercise plans” to be highly correlated, but there are other interesting keyword trends, as well.
From this we see that keywords like “timeshare rental” and “wedding planning” are also very highly correlated with “diet tips.” This sort of insight can shed more light into the real market for brands and products that may not have ever occurred to the search managers or even to the advertiser. In addition, if you upload your own time series data to the tool, Google Correlate will search for the closest matched search terms by volume to that data. There are some insightful examples built into the tool that show how real world data can influence your search strategies like seeing which search terms correlate with the average latitude by state (heated seats), or which search terms are more popular in winter (pumpkin soup).
While this tool may be fun and interesting to play around with (we highly recommend it), the insights gathered may actually be very informative to your own campaign strategies by giving you an edge others may have not noticed. Click to find out more about SEO strategy and support services from Booyah.
