Taking a look at Google tools - #1: Google Trends

This is going to be a regular feature on this blog. Google as we all know, is the best biggest search engine in the world (up to 77% search market share in 2006). But what alot of people don't know, is that Google also produce a wide (and growing) range of product and services which fulfil a wide range of needs for it's users. These products aren't all very well known, so we're going to look at each of them one by one, to raise awareness of what they do and how they can be used by 'normal' website users.

Where to begin? Ok, let's start with Google Trends. Why? Well, I can't think of anything else at the moment :) But also Google trends is very, very useful tool to help users identify how popular given search phrases and words are, as well as when they are popular.

Google trends allows users to compare up to five key phrases against each other to see which one is more popular. It does this by drawing nice looking graphs so you can see instantly which one is the best.

Let's have an example. Below shows an example of 'web design' vs 'online marketing'


What does the screen show? First, it shows the nice graph. What you can see is that 'web design' alot more popular than 'online marketing'. However, web design has been on the decline over the last few years, while online marketing is very gradually improving. Underneath the main graph si the graph which show the trends of news items. This is a rough figure of how many times the phrase entered has been used in Google News items. You'll see that the most important or 'relevant' (this is Google remember - relevancy!) news items are shown on the main Google trend graph along the time line and listed to the right of the graph, which can then be clicked on to to go the story.

Underneath the graph are the countries and towns which are have done the most searches on Google, for the phrases you entered. So, in this example, the Google users in Indonesia have made the most searches for web design. It is important to note, that Google 'normalizes' the search data from the towns and countries. What is normalization? It basically means that a calculation is made to reduce the amount of searches overall and shows which places have a higher propotion of searches. For example, London would nearly always have the most searches, as it has the most amount of people. But proportionally, for some phrases, other parts of the country might have comparatively more.

Why is Google trends important then? Well, prior to this tool, we had know way of knowing which phrases were more popular on Google. We had no idea of when the phrases we popular. We had no idea which places made the most searches. Google trends allows us to peak into the head of searchers across the world to help us better understand their habits. Using this information, we can now put together better and more efficient online marketing strategies and gain better results for our clients. And all this for free!

Even, if you are not bothered about search marketing, it's just fun to play with. Who's more popular? He-man or She-ra? Star Wars or Star Trek? Man Utd or Liverpool? Beatles or Rolling Stones? The list is endless.

Have fun!