Understanding developing trends can be an important aspect of creating marketing campaigns to promote your product or service.
Before Google was born, most trending information was collected offline by the government or private survey companies. This data, if it was publicly available, was either expensive to get or out of date by several years.
Now, however, there is a new way to get trending data, at least from an Internet stand point. Google Trending is opening up a whole new world to what people are searching for online.
If you don’t think Google is interested in this type of information, then you are not paying close enough attention to what this giant is doing.
Just as McDonald’s is not really in the hamburger business (they are really in the real estate business), Google is not in the search business, but rather they are in the advertising business. Search is just a tool to get them close to advertiser.
By knowing what people are searching for, they are better positioned to sell to these advertisers. Which brings us back to Google Trends.
Google Trends, found at http://www.google.com/trends, is an extremely informative tool that can tell you not only WHAT people are searching for, but what country or city they are in.
Why is that interesting you might ask. Well, if you’re on a limited advertising budget, as most people are, and you want to run a pay-per-click campaign, you would do well to target cities that have the most interest in what you are selling or promoting.
Targeting a select group of people for your ad spend will give you a higher quality of visitor traffic for each of your click throughs.
In short, a highly focused group of website visitors means you have a better chance of making a sale.
In fact, you can use trending to determine what product or service to offer before you even start. For example, lets say you notice a trend in searches for podcasting. If an increasing trend is for the search term, “how to podcast”, then you might want to develop a product or service around that topic. Conversely, if you see a trending down of this topic you might be inclined not to spend time developing a product or service around this topic.
Now, before we close this post, let me clear up a one point of interest. Google Trending is a Google Labs tool, which means it is in a state of change. So the information it provides should be compared to other measurement points. If you think there is a lot of interest in a particular topic, then pull information together from several different sources and see what type of picture they paint. Don’t put all your intelligence gathering into just this one tool. You’ll be better off and you’ll have a clearer picture of what is happening if you use multiple sources of information.
All that aside. Google Trending is likely to become more robust and more useful over time. It’s difficult to say if Google will ever fully release all their trending information. My guess is that it’s in their best interest to release as much information as they can. What form that information will be provided in is yet to be seen. But to date Google has done very well with the presentation of information for general consumption. I would expect that they would follow this same trend with Google Trending.
Keep reaching for success,
Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com
Resources:
Google Trends:
http://www.google.com/trends
Search Trend:Adsense http://www.google.com/trends?q=adsense&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
Search Trend:Christmas http://www.google.com/trends?q=christmas&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
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