The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

The log of a single person's search-query history is like a diary of their thoughts and desires in machine-readable format. But when aggregated over a population of hundreds of millions of search engine users and plotted against time, the log of a search engine’s total queries is a mosaic index of fads, news events, culture, and annual seasonal trends. Search engines collect this data, and in many cases make it publically available.  
 
To a sociologist, Google Trends data is a chronological map of our collective consciousness. The volume of searches for "Easter bunny" yields a graph like an EKG of a heartbeat. Much like a cardiac sinus rhythm, we flock to Google each spring for information about our favorite imaginary rabbit, after eleven months of not caring about him at all. And it appears that trends in Google search volume for flu symptom-related keywords are an earlier, and more accurate predictor of flu outbreaks than the Center for Disease Control's official reports.
 
But search query data is also rich with information that can benefit marketers. Google Trends can tell us that people shop for "flowers" predominantly on Valentine's day and Mother's day, with mothers receiving significantly more flowers than lovers (although this bias appears to be reversed in Australia.) 
 
In most of these examples, there are large, annual macro trends in search-query volumes for obviously seasonal topics. However, recent research by Google Labs suggests that even small search trends are predictable. Google Labs found that over half of the high-volume keywords on Google have recurring, predictable, seasonal variance. For these keywords, Google Insights for Search can provide surprisingly reliable estimates of future search volumes.
 
Google Insights for Search is open to anyone with a Google Account (you will need to log in to use the service.) And it is designed to help marketers prepare for upcoming trends. Suppose you run a bakery, and you want to know how much of your SEM ad budget to allocate to this December. Google Insights for Search will tell you that even though searches for "birthday cake" are on a long-term upwards trend, you can expect a dip in demand this December (sorry folks with a birthday in December - less cake for you.)

Next time you're not sure how much budget to allocate to a specific month, don't just guess.  Instead, get your answers from data collected from real searches on Google Insights for Search.
 
Ehren Reilly, Clickable SEM Guru

Note: Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. "Clickable Gurus" participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus posts a search marketing tip to the Clickable Blog.

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