Using Google Trends For Marketing Research

Search term trend sites tend to be fun but rarely seem that useful from a business sense, though they should be for so many reasons.  I think the main problem is that they generally only give you enough data to treat them as entertainment, which is probably the point, but not so helpful to business researchers.

In playing around a bit with Google Trends, I did see a couple of interesting possibilities for those concerned with marketing hip hop in other countries and I'm sure more uses could be found.

A combined search for hip hop, rap illustrates my point.  Notice that, at the moment, the cities list begins with Santiago, Chile at no. 1 with New York, NY in the 6 spot.  What you're seeing is not a comparison of overall searches on hip hop or rap but a comparison of cities with a large number of search on those terms that are ranked by the percentage in their area of searches on those terms.

So if only 10 searches were made in Santiago and one of them was on hip hop, they would be ranked higher than New York if 100 searches were made and 5 were hip hop, i.e. 10% beats 5%.  But somehow they make up for the overall number of searches so that you're not comparing Lizard Lick, NC with Los Angeles, CA.

At least, that's what I think they're saying.  Since there's a limit to how much info they share, it's hard to really evaluate it thoroughly but, if you see a readable explanation by someone who also seems to understand what Google actually does, please let me know.

You'll notice when comparing cities in the hip hop, rap search, searchers in Santiago were much more likely to use hip hop than rap while searches in Los Angeles appeared equally likely and those nutty folks in San Francisco used rap more often than hip hop.

Even this miniscule piece of data suggests some interesting possibilities for further exploration.  For example, if you were planning marketing campaigns that were country specific, you might want to use hip hop more often than rap in copy for Chile while in California it might not matter.

Of course, we know that in the States, some hip hop acts who market themselves to fans that see rap as a degraded form of hip hop would not want to use the term rap at all.  And the issue of native languages vs. English also complicates things.  Nevertheless, realizing that differences in use of terminology may be revealed by search trends suggests a lot of interesting possibilities in shaping language to regional markets, especially online.

Unfortunately, the current limits of data available from Google Trends means that it's primarily useful as a quick tool for idea generation and brainstorming.  But that's a good thing, especially if it helps one past misguided assumptions and moves one towards more useful data gathering.