How To Use Google Trends Like A Pro

Google Trends is one of my favorite tools to come out of the Google Labs. While we data junkies are forced to envy people like Bill Tancer who have access to tons of rich, real time data about what’s going on on the web, Google Trends is the best thing that we can get for free, and it’s still very useful for basic analysis and research. In this post I’ll show you a few great ways you can use Google Trends to do research on the web like a pro and give you a quick list of hacks you can use to build your “Google Ninja” skills.

Why Use Google Trends?

Because historical data for global search volume is awesome, that’s why. Just kicking it old school with a standard keyword rich Google search is OK, sure. But when you’re doing research on a person, industry or particular topic or product, digging through Google’s search volume data can put your searches into historical context and give you a lot of insight into human behavior and reactions. After all, search volume data (how much people are searching for a keyword or term at a point in time) is a great measure of how interested people are in a particular topic over any given time period.

What To Use Google Trends For

Search trend data can get us insight into how important a topic is to the public in the following ways:

Analyze Crowd Behavior:

Search volume on big news items or events that draw a crowd will show large spikes in  search volume graphs for searches on keywords related to a story around the time the story broke or an event took place. “American Idol” is a great example. We can see people clearly begin to start searching for the term “American Idol” each year when the show first airs, then search volume spikes when the the top 12 are announced (small spike), then searching dies down a bit, followed by a huge peak at the end when the winner is announced and an immediate fall off. Trends will serve up popular Google news articles that occurred closest to the search volume spikes, letting you know how popular/newsworthy a story or event was and when it occurred. You can use these graphs to build an accurate time line of popular events around a phenomenon, even if you were never aware of the subject matter.

Analyze Event Sequence and Significance:

If you’re researching a company, CEO or celebrity, a regular Google search is a good start, but the context for the links you’ll get served will be random. Using Trends, however, is an awesome place to start, because it’ll likely give you insight into which news stories were historically most popular. We can see here that a search on Mark Zuckerberg (CEO of Facebook) surfaces obvious spikes in searches (each one is linked to a Google news story and a date). Once you have this data, you can quickly go back to Google and begin searching on much more targeted keywords like “Mark Zuckerberg Sheryl Sandberg March” that are related to those news stories that peaked popular interest.

We Are What We Search – Patterns Tell A Story:

Finding cyclical patterns in search volume data is super interesting and can give you an idea about when a particular product, topic or event is on people’s minds. You can literally take the pulse of the internet. This example shows search volume for 5 search terms and their links to significant holidays:

• “Gift” spikes right before Christmas
• “Valentines” spikes right before Valentines Day
• “egg” spikes right before Easter
• “fireworks” spikes right before 4th of July, and
• “costume” spikes right before Halloween

Hint: You can drill down to get more specific data for any search term by geography and for a specific time period – get creative and be as specific with search terms as possible. Asking the right questions gets you better answers.

Find Out What’s Hot and What’s Not:

Ever wonder how popular something is compared to something else? Search volume is a great indicator. If we compare Facebook, Myspace and Twitter for example, we can see the cultural shift over time in social networking. We can even pinpoint the month where Facebook overtook Myspace. Twitter’s just a small growing blip on the graph because it’s so new…but you can see that it didn’t start to get popular until the end of 2008, and many of us were on it in 2007.

Here’s an interesting example of a hot topic in pop culture many of us have been talking about today. Kris Allen beat Adam Lambert in American Idol. It was the biggest upset in Idol history, in my opinion. Kris shouldn’t have had a prayer of winning. The data tells the true story of what happened. Adam was by far more popular worldwide throughout the competition, but Arkansas, which is historically the top voting state for Idol stayed loyal to Kris…(I’ll leave you all to battle it out in the comments about why AR sucks ;-))

In short, there are many different ways you can use Google Trends to mine search data to do better research. These are just a few examples to get your creative juices flowing. Remember:

Be specific with your search terms – target your words in order to ask the right questions. Also,

Play with the variables – Tweaking regional, chronological and geographical variables will often get you better information. Think about what questions you’re really looking to answer and use the tool to put the queries in context.

Use The Search Bar Like A Pro: Quotation Marks, Minus signs and Vertical Bars

Just a few more tricks to add to your ninja skill set…you can use some cool operands to really get hardcore if you want to…

• Remember, you can compare up to five terms by separating each one with a comma. For example, to compare ‘boots’ and ’sneakers,’ simply enter boots, sneakers and click  Search Trends.

• To see how many searches contained either term, list them and separate with a vertical bar ( | ): boots | sneakers
• To see how many searches were done for either ’snow boots’ or ’sneakers,’ use parentheses around the multi-word term: (snow boots) | sneakers.
• You can also exclude terms from your search by using the minus sign. For instance, to see how many searches contained the term ‘boots’ but not ‘hiking,’ enter boots-hiking.
• To restrict your results to only those searches that contain your terms in the specific order you’ve entered them, you can put your terms in quotation marks: “snow boots”. (By default, Google Trends will show you all searches that contain the terms you entered in any order.)
• Note that when you use any of these advanced features – quotation marks, minus signs, or vertical bars – Trends will only display the Search Volume Index graph. The news portion doesn’t support advanced functionality at this time.