Marketers work with search data every day, but we’re greatly underutilizing its potential.
Let me explain.
Search data can tell us all kinds of things about markets, audiences, behavior, and preferences. It’s a source of intelligence that informs smarter, better, more timely business decisions beyond SEO.
In this article, I’ll introduce you to a different way of looking at “search data.”
We’ll talk about sources, which data to pull, and how to use it to arrive at powerful insights quickly.
What Is Search Data?
Search data is any data collected when a user searches a public website by entering a query string to find relevant information (products, information, or answers) from a library of different content (website pages, media) published from different sources (websites, creators).
When people conduct this type of search, they take direct action driven by a need. Put more simply, search data is “active demand.”
Looking at search behavior at scale unlocks a new way of gauging demand for whole industries, specific verticals, unique topics, individual brands, and beyond. This process is known as digital market intelligence.
What Is Digital Market Intelligence?
Digital market intelligence collects and analyzes thousands to (sometimes) millions of digital data points – from public, ethically sourced data – to get to the kind of insights that would traditionally require qualitative surveying.
Except that it’s a lot faster than surveying, and often, it’s more accurate because:
The data reflects real behavior from real people who are free from survey bias or influence.
It collects vast data sets in mere days (versus weeks or even months), ensuring timeliness and relevance.
Data sets contain significantly more data representing huge swaths of the population (versus a small survey sample).
Image from Gray Dot Co, October 2024
Search data is one of the primary inputs in digital market intelligence because it provides an abundance of real user behavior data at an extremely low cost.
Note: DMI is most effective when looking at established industries with a meaningful digital footprint – it doesn’t work for everything!
Where Do We Get The Data?
When most of us think of “search data,” we think of Google data. And make no mistake, that’s a huge piece of the puzzle. Google is still a giant in the search game!
But more and more, people are looking outside of Google for information. In fact, some data sources name TikTok as the world’s largest search engine for Gen-Z users — not Google.
So, when we talk about search data, we’re still talking about Google and other search engines.
But we’re also stepping out of the silo and acknowledging that sources like YouTube, Pinterest, TikTok, etc. are sources where users exhibit active demand.
The datasets from each are extremely valuable for digital market intelligence because we can tap into them at a marginal cost via APIs, platform-specific reporting tools, and third-party tools.
(For a lot cheaper than traditional consumer insights work!)
Google Search Console.
Google Ads.
Youtube API.
Google Trends.
Third-party tools like Semrush or Ahrefs.
Pinterest.
TikTok.
Image from Gray Dot Co, October 2024
Which Search Data Is Meaningful?
Now that we’ve established where we’re actually sourcing the data, what are we pulling?
Metrics we work with day in and day out are the raw inputs for calculations that answer big business questions:
Image from Gray Dot Co, October 2024
Keyword volume quantifies how often people actively look for products, information, or brands at any given time.
Hashtag volume measures how much of the content landscape is saturated by a given topic or brand.
Keyword intent identifies where people are in the customer journey, plus common behavior and language at different funnel stages.
Competitor research compares demand for brands apples-to-apples, plus how much demand each captures in the landscape.
Historical trends create a clear snapshot of shifts in demand to illustrate the trendline for any topic area over time.
What Can Search Data Tell Us About The Market?
Digital market intelligence can answer a lot of the questions marketing teams and even business leaders run into regularly.
Let’s take a look at some of the most common and illustrate how DMI can yield quick insights using search data.
Did The Market Grow Or Shrink YoY?
This is basically an exercise in summing active demand for the search terms that apply to your business or industry.
In a classic consumer insights sense, the size of the market is generally referred to as the Total Addressable Market.
To quantify TAM using search data, calculate the total keyword volume for the year across relevant search terms. You can source and export keyword volume at scale by using a third-party tool such as Semrush or Ahrefs.
Once you have your TAM total for both years, compare them to quantify the YoY difference. In terms of a calculation, it would look something like this: