Google Insights for Search: What can be learned from Google’s new trend spotting tool

August 6th, 2008 by Dr. Taly Weiss

Filed under Coca Cola, consumer behavior, Google Trends, internet behavior, search, search volume, Trend Spotting Tools

Google has just introduced a new search trend spotting tool: Google Insights for Search. Google Insights provides web analytics, advertisers and marketers new means to understand search behavior –
now free of charge.

Similar to Google Trends, users can insert a search term to see search volume patterns over time, as well as the top related and rising searches. Users will get the ability to compare search volume trends across multiple search terms, categories, geographic regions, or specific time ranges.

What can you gain from Google Insights for Search?

Offering a smart search analysis, one can compare

Coca Cola to Pepsi within the Food and Drink category, to find out exciting facts on the US search queries during 2008:

While the whole category is in rise during the summer season, Coca Cola and Pepsi, are stepping down. (why ? Any guess ?)

The search for Pepsi exceeds not only the search for Coca Cola, but is found to be much higher than the whole category.

Coca Cola is most popular in Georgia while Pepsi is most popular in West Virginia.

Rising search terms for Coca Cola includes coca cola wiki (+100%) , coca cola park, (+80%), pepsi careers (+50%), coca cola mexico (+50%), coca cola careers (+40%), pepsi products (+30%), coca cola zero (+30%), coca cola factory (+30%), coca cola china (+30%), pepsi jobs (+20%).

Rising search terms for Pepsi are influenced much from Pepsi Stuff activities, and includes: pepsistuff.com, pepsistuff, pepsi tava, pepsi stuff.com, pepsi stuff points, pepsi stuff codes, pepsi stuff amazon, pepsi stuff.com, pepsi raw, pepsi musica.com (see – promotion does work!)

Note that you can click on each search term to find its specific popularity, and can download a csv file for your convenience.

Google search insights: Coca Cola 2008, USA, Drink and Food category

Google search insights: Pepsi 2008, USA, Drink and Food category

Google competes with leading web analytics providers:

Only recently, Google introduced Google Trends For Websites , a new tool that lets users observe the traffic data from sites around the web. As suggested by TechCrunch, “the new feature pits Google against a number of well-established players in the traffic data space, including Compete , Comscore , and Alexa ”.

Today, Google opens another competitive frontier against search analytics providers as Hitwise, Compete and ComScore. Google offers a free playground, but not one customized to companies specific tracking needs. Moreover, as in other Google trend tools, it displays only relative results.

Yes, its probably Google’s strategy stating – we do know it all, we govern all data and use it for our own interests.

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3 Responses

iwebie Says:
September 13th, 2008 at 6:51 am
Google Insights for Search is a service by Google similar to but a much more advanced extension to Google Trends with more flexibility and functionality.

Check here to know more

http://www.iwebie.com/google-insights-for-search
Vebyquene Says:
November 25th, 2009 at 9:31 am
OMG enjoyed reading your blogpost. I added your feed to my blogreader.
Steve Kirschner Says:
February 2nd, 2010 at 7:53 pm
Good stuff! Google Insights for Search is a great tool, and there really are a lot of interesting insights you can gain from the data. I’ve been having a lot of fun with it. In fact, you should check out the following facebook fan page:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Are-we-what-we-search/294184966418