To find out the interests of potential customers, assess the demand for certain products, analyze existing and no longer relevant trends, find out the volume of requests for popular search phrases entered by users from different countries and regions – this is not all the information that can be obtained using Google Trends.
If you want to learn more about the capabilities of this tool, and also understand why it is necessary for everyone who promotes their product online, read this article. In addition to the above, you will learn how to work with the system.
What is Google Trends?
Google Trends is an online tool, the use of which opens up the possibility of using a huge amount of data, which contains information about the demand for any query or phenomenon at a given point on the planet at a certain time interval.
The service allows you to get information about the dynamics of the number of search queries, see a decrease or increase. In the accumulated database, you can find data on the demographic characteristics of demand in a particular field of activity, catch popular trends and changes in consumer priorities.
Using this tool, you will gather valuable information to make decisions about scaling your business and better understand the needs and desires of your audience. Additionally, Google Trends allows you to predict the profitability of sales.
What is Google Trends for?
Using Google Trends is handy if you need to:
Find additional markets or new areas of activity. You can get information about the level of popularity of the product at the current time, as well as evaluate the dynamics of consumer interest in it;
Analyze seasonality in a particular area. Using the service, it is easy to assess the change in demand over time and identify seasonal deviations;
To identify the most promising regions for business development. You will be able to determine the territories where it is most expedient to scale the business;
Keep up-to-date on trends in your field. Such data helps to create in-demand content for a web resource, publish news on topics important to the audience, shoot an interesting video;
Assess brand awareness. The service allows you to get a completely reliable assessment of the level of popularity of a trademark, company or brand and compare it with that of competitors.
How Google Trends works
Numeric values for a certain time interval or geographic location are calculated according to the following rules:
The relative rating of a specific keyword is determined as a share in the total number of all search queries in a given territory for a certain time interval. If the ranking were based on absolute values, then the first places in the list would always be occupied by regions with the most active users;
The indicators obtained are arranged in ascending or descending order using a 100-point scale, reflecting the demand for topics in comparison with requests for any other topics;
In regions where the number of requests for a given phrase is the same, the total volume of other requests can vary greatly;
The system does not provide information on rarely used key phrases received in large numbers from the same user in a short period of time.
How to work with the Google Trends service?
The service interface is intuitive and not overloaded with unnecessary information. To understand how to work with Google Trends, let’s look at its most popular tools:
Current trends
The Trending module, located on the start page, displays the most requested topics over the past hour. Such information gives an idea of the general trends in the behavior of the online audience, helps to use popular newsbreaks to create creative advertising.
The “Popular Queries” module is customizable – you can choose to display search trends for the current moment and for one day, define a region for searching for relevant news:
By subscribing to the newsletter and specifying its frequency in the settings (daily, weekly or upon the fact of a trend change), you will receive news on topics of interest to you by e-mail.
Query Popularity
Among the information available in the “Analysis” module are data on search queries for a particular product and the dynamics of changes in their demand, information on the profitability of media campaigns and brand popularity.
The tool allows you to compare trends taking into account the territorial reference and carry out analysis in different time intervals, etc. It is possible to upload data to a file with the .csv extension.
Absolute values are not used as indicators for ranking. The algorithm assigns the value 100 to the largest number in the period, and calculates the rest as their ratio to the maximum. In the parameters, you can specify the region, the analyzed time interval, the category and type of search.
Seasonality
When selling some goods and services, one cannot ignore the seasonality factor. Using the “Analysis” module, you can track the dynamics of changes in popularity over time, confirm or refute the hypothesis about the cyclical change in demand for a product.
Important! The period for seasonality analysis should be long enough, ideally several years. Then on the chart you can see bursts of popularity for a particular product or service.
If the demand for products is seasonal, it is rational to plan marketing activities for periods of rise. Using the Google Trends tool, you can also identify leading trends.
Popularity comparison
With the help of the service tools, you can conduct a comparative analysis of the demand for different phrases (up to 5 at the same time). In this way, you can compare substitute products and analogues, competing organizations and brands for a certain time period with a territorial reference and a choice of categories. In the request field, filtering is configured quickly and easily:
Geography of demand
You can analyze data in several sections: by countries, regions, and even districts of the same locality. This functionality is useful both for large companies that consider the possibility of territorial expansion as one of their main strategies, and for small organizations whose sales market is located within the same geographical location:
Related user queries
In Google Trends, you can get information about similar or related keywords, different spellings of certain phrases for the qualitative formation of a semantic core in SEO promotion:
A list of alternative wordings that are used to search for a brand or product appears when you switch the “Trendy” option to “Leaders”.
Popular queries for the year
“Year in search” is a feature that allows you to track the most popular queries for each year, starting from 2001. This tool is interesting for those who are looking for new ideas for marketing campaigns and analyze changes in user preferences:
A selection of the most popular topics is displayed on a separate page and is accompanied by a series of videos highlighting the most important media events of the period.
Search operators
For ease of use, Google Trends can add search operators to a query. The system supports:
«+» – with the help of a plus, you can find out the popularity of several search queries at once. This is especially true when the user can enter the keyword in different languages or in different word forms. For example, “Facebook + Facebook + FB”.
«-» – allows you to exclude from the results the query that is located after the minus sign. For example, you need to get statistics on the popularity of Samsung Galaxy throughout Ukraine, excluding Kyiv. Then the request should look like this: “Samsung Galaxy – Kyiv”.
«””» – using quotation marks, you can fix the word order in the query and the word form (similar to phrase matching in Google Ads). However, for keywords that are not very popular, Google Trends may return “insufficient data” when quotes are used.
Google Trends Guide with Examples
Let’s use short examples to show how you can use the Google Trends service to evaluate search queries.
How to determine the seasonality of demand?
In the “Analysis” module, enter the phrase “sunglasses” for the region “Ukraine” and set the boundaries of the analyzed time interval. On the chart that appears, you can see with the naked eye that demand reaches its maximum in May-June. It is reasonable to assume that advertising investments in the most popular months will be the most effective. This phenomenon must be taken into account by SEO specialists and administrators of online stores when scheduling work to optimize a web resource, as well as PPC specialists to calculate the start date of an advertising campaign:
Find out the demand in a specific region
Let’s analyze the distribution of query popularity by region. This tool allows for more complex comparative filtering at the level of several countries at the same time, as well as by sub-regions and cities. To see the degree of interest for a particular subject, hover over the corresponding area of the map:
How to find related queries?
Google Trends is a powerful analytics tool that allows you to target by interests when setting up your ads. The information is presented in the form of clusters, which include data about what else users are interested in when searching for a particular product or service. A list of similar key phrases can become the basis for filling the semantic core.
Information! When a query’s popularity grows above 5000%, the “Super popular” mark is displayed instead of the numerical value of the indicator.
Using keywords at the growth stage of their popularity for SEO optimization and advertising is a rational solution that allows you to monetize the trend.
Know your competitors
Statistics of related topics and similar queries helps to evaluate competitors that are of interest to your potential buyers. Using this information, you can highlight your strengths on the pages of the site.
Determine keyword frequency
Another use of the Google Trends toolkit for search engine optimization purposes and when compiling a semantic core. Among several synonymous words, you can choose the most popular one using its frequency indicator:
Choose the most requested product in your niche
To solve this problem, the same comparison functionality is used as in the previous version. The tool makes it possible to spend the marketing budget rationally, focusing on the most popular product. As an example, consider the frequency of requests related to different types of sports equipment:
Obviously, the treadmill is in the lead, so the majority of the advertising budget should be allocated to it.
Predict YouTube video popularity
Using Google Trends, you can evaluate which video themes are the most popular lately on YouTube.
Video content is increasingly being shown in search results. It is a rich snippet above the search results. Properly chosen topics and video optimization can increase traffic not only from YouTube video hosting, but also from organic results.
Find a popular topic for an article or video
In some sources describing how to use Google Trends, this tool is only mentioned in connection with private use by bloggers who track topics that can be hyped.
But high-quality SMM promotion also requires information about sensations and events related to media people. In this way, you can attract the attention of your audience by publishing a post on a relevant topic.
