The holidays are over. You’ve stuffed your face to the max, feel guilty and think about joining the local gym. You’re back at your old boring job and wish for a new one or at least another holiday where the sun is shining. With every start of a new year comes the hope of a new beginning – and search trends will tell marketers exactly what you wish for.
Within a couple of hours at the second day back from the holidays I’ve recieved no less than three calls from different recruiters. Since it’s the first week back from the winter holidays, they figure odds are that I’ve been contemplating a change – be that for my career or lifestyle. They know their industry seasonality by heart, and so should you for every campaign to maximise its search marketing results.
While the above trends are hardly news, I’m still amazed about the level of insights that can be gained by analyzing search traffic. The aptly named tool Google Trends is free to use and plots search interest over time. It doesn’t provide exact search volume figures, but for the purpouse of plotting trends it does what it says on the tin.
The search terms "jobs", "holidays", "gym" all peak around New Year, indicating that renewing oneself (surprise, surprise) is a big wish for the year ahead
Google Trends is a fantastic research tool to understand what people are searching for, and as it also plots related news mentions, it’s possible to see how major events have impacted search volumes at specific points in time.
The Google Nexus Phone trend
With today’s launch of the Google Nexus Phone, the keyword is trending on both Twitter and Google. Looking at the search patterns, its clear that there’s long been an interest for a “Google Phone”, with the brand “Nexus” gaining momentum mid-December and shooting off into the stratosphere on January 4th.
A very potent feature of Google Trends is the Hot Searches which today contains both “nexus one verizon”, “nexus one vs droid” and “google store” in its top ten list – here’s some serious opportunistic potential of possibly cheap traffic for brands and affiliates alike.
The Google Nexus Phone gained momentum on January 5th 2010
How are you analysing and utilising search trends, and what are your favourite tools?
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