6 Ways to Use Google Trends for Marketing

What was the last thing you Googled? Do you want to share it with the public?

Search histories can tell a story about a person and their thoughts.

But I can’t imagine anyone willingly giving up their personal search history – especially if they identify it – without any incentive whatsoever.

Fortunately, we can use Google Trends for this insight.

Let’s see what Google Trends is, where the data comes from, and how you can use Google Trends for market research, product innovation, and more.

What is Google Trends?

“Discover what the world is looking for” greets you on the Google Trends homepage and reflects exactly what the tool is doing.

Google Trends visualizes trending topics, search terms and news on Google. It provides real-time data on re electricity Trends over the past seven days as well past Trends that go back to 2004.

Where does Google Trends data come from?

Google Trends contains anonymized samples – real-time and non-real-time – of search queries sent to Google, which are then categorized into topics.

Because we can see trends by location, the data is normalized to ensure that regions with the highest search volume do not consistently rank highest.

To normalize the data, Google divides each data point by the total number of searches for the region and the time period it represents to compare relative popularity. These numbers are then scaled to a range from 0 to 100 based on a topic’s contribution to all searches on all topics.

An important caveat about the data is that Google stores queries that may come from “irregular activity”. According to Google, this is done to maintain the quality of the search data from other Google tools.

Put simply, if Google were to filter out spam activity from trends, spammers could use the tool to understand which words are identified as spam and adjust them accordingly.

In addition to search query data, the real-time search trends report also shows the number of Google News articles written per hour.

How to use Google Trends

Google Trends offers several ways to slice and dice the data. Google Trends consists of four main areas:

• Explore
• Popular searches
• Year in search
• Subscriptions

The data can be filtered by location, date, categories, search area (e.g. news vs. shopping) and even by topic vs. search terms. Instead of going through each section and visualization, let’s see how they apply to general marketing tasks.

1. Use Google Trends for market research

Do you need to understand the interest in your product or service in order to enter a new market?

Google Trends Explore can help you understand how seasonality and location can affect your product or service.

In the Country drop-down list below your search query, you can, for example, filter by a metropolitan region or click on the options on the map. You can also change the date to expand or decrease the history. Note, however, that if you select a time within seven days, the example changes.

Pro tip: As you enter your query, keep the options populated automatically in mind. Everything that does

no “search term” under it is a topic. Topics are aggregated categories, while search terms focus on keywords. The same applies to the “Related Topics” and “Related Queries” tables. Start with a broader topic, then limit yourself to specific search terms as you analyze the results.

2. Check out Google Trends for newsjacking

Do you use newsjacking to generate content? Then you should definitely use Google Trends subscriptions. Subscribe to receive the most important, most or all search trends weekly, daily or in real-time.

3. Use Google Trends for keyword research

Many keyword research tools show an expected monthly search volume. If you don’t track this data month after month, it’s hard to tell whether the search for the topic is up or down. Google Trends can provide you with the directional data to be coupled with your monthly search volume.

As you review the trends for your keywords, you can find related searches that are also included in your keyword set.

If you’re not sure what people are looking for, try using the auto-complete topic that Google displays and check out the “Related Searches” filtered for top searches. If you found different terms in the related queries, add up to five to compare them.

Pro tip: Make sure you use search terms. Enclosing your search in quotation marks ensures that the entire phrase is used in that order. You can use punctuation to refine your search to include or exclude specific words.

4. Use Google Trends for product innovation

Are you looking for insights into the latest colors, materials or styles for your product? For example, let’s say you start out broadly with one topic in Explore.

In this case, the “Related Queries” filtered by Rising can reveal trend colors, materials or other product innovations and show how much interest has increased in the selected period. Those marked with a breakout show a significant increase compared to the previous period and have grown by more than 5000%.

5. Use Google Trends for topic clustering

Hopefully by now you understand the difference between search terms and topics in trending.

For topics, Google Trends can help simplify your topic clustering strategy. When you search for a term, Google gives you topics instead of just search terms, and when one is selected, “Related Topics” are listed as well. The real-time search trends report gives you an idea of ​​how Google News is helping to build relationships between topics.

However, we can go further than issues. After choosing a term, you can choose a category. While these are used to refine your search query, once a category is selected you can remove your search and it will leave searches and topics associated with the parent category.

6. Try Google Trends to analyze news publications

Are you pitching or working on the news? Then you want to dive into the data on Trending Searches.

As mentioned earlier, the real-time trend search lists how many Google News articles were created on a trending topic every hour. As soon as you have selected a topic, the bar charts show the newly added articles for this hour and the cumulative total. You can see how the news can lead or follow the search trend.

The articles listed are the top articles based on the Google News ranking system, according to Google. By subscribing to certain topics, you can keep track of which publications are ranking well.

Focus on presenting the publications that are regularly published on your subjects. If you’re a publisher, check out these competitors to see if you can update your structured data or Publisher Center information to keep it up to date.

Ready to start exploring? Dive into Google Trends now and see how you can use the tool in a unique way for your own business needs.