Google’s Daniel Waisberg and Omri Weisman share three tips for improving both online and offline marketing strategies. They explain how to leverage Google Trends search data to make better decisions about products, optimize strategies, understand consumer behavior, and focus marketing efforts for a higher ROI.
Google offers three tips:
How To Benchmark Against Competitors
Analyzing Brand Awareness
Forecasting Product Demand
How To Benchmark Against Competitors
Google’s Daniel Waisberg showed that one way to research competitors is to do a head-to-head comparison of search terms for your company versus competitors by entering your company name or domain name in one panel of the Google Trends and your competitor’s in the second one. He suggests selecting a topic from the “categories” drop down menu which will allow for more specific user intent segmentation, where a user is looking for results in a specific niche or topic. Waisberg comments that it’s okay to not choose a category if one doesn’t exist.
Although he doesn’t mention it, there’s an additional way to segment users by the type of search (web search, image search, Google shopping, and YouTube search). This is an option that’s available that can help see how people are searching (images, videos, etc.) in comparison to competitors.
Step 1: Choose A Category
Google Trends shows a trend line indicating how often users are searching for both company names. The trend line shows if a company is trending up over time, if it’s experiencing a downward trajectory or if customer demand is on a steady level. Spikes can be evidence of seasonality but sharp spikes could be a sign of a marketing effort or promotion paying off.
Waisberg encourages users to scroll down to inspect search trends by subregion, metro areas and cities. While Waisberg suggests it’s a way to determine demand for opening a store, the way I use the information is for determining geographical areas where demand is higher and focus online marketing effort there to maximize ROI. This can be done for link building, PPC, email, whatever you’re method is.
Step 2: Analyze Subregions
Daniel Waisberg begins his explanation at the 03:11 minute mark:
“Looking at the results, you can see how well your competitor is doing in comparison to you over time. …when you scroll down, you can compare how strong you are for each of the subregions, metro areas and cities available, and these could help you gather data when deciding where to open a new store.”
2. Analyzing Brand Awareness
Waisberg explains that Google Trends can be used to track brand awareness by filtering results over time to identify what people are saying about the brand. He recommends setting the time range for the past 30 or 90 days.
Related search terms that are rising or are top terms offer insights into how consumers are perceiving your brand, including what they’re associating the brand with. This same method can be applied to analyze YouTube search trends related to brand by selecting YouTube Search from the Categories drop down menu at the top of the Google Trends page.
Google’s Omri Weisman explains from the 4:37 minute mark: