An Analysis of How Google Trends Can Help You Make Marketing Decisions

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There are so many useful tools available for online retailers to use in order to understand their marketplace. Unfortunately, most online retailers, especially the smaller organizations, are just too busy to be able to locate and use these tools to greatest advantage. One of the best places to look for helpful tools is Google. These folks really understand the Internet marketplace. They not only grasp how best to maximize the potential of the marketplace, they have the technical skills to build the programming elements to put their knowledge to work. One of the Google tools that you may find very useful is a bit of software called Google Trends. Google Trends is designed to help you track trends in keyword searches. You enter a keyword and click on search trends. The program will return with a report on the volume of searches for that keyword over time. It will also provide a list of relevant news items related to that keyword and mark the trend line to show the correlation between the news story and the search term trend. You can customize the search to include only specific time periods or specific countries. If you choose to search for a trend in the U.S., you can drill down to the state and major city level. How does this help? Consider that you are a seller of household appliances, primarily in the U.S. You search for the overall term and find that although there is some seasonal fluctuation, the searches for household appliances remain fairly even. Now search for segments within appliances. A search on coffee makers shows a clear indication that searches for coffee makers go way up around the holidays. This information tells you that coffee makers seem to be a hot gift idea and you should have extra inventory on hand and should increase your paid ad budget at that time when a lot of searches are being done. You also notice that whenever a recall is announced, searches go way up. This suggest that you should be sure that you have a Google new alert established for the search term coffee maker and whenever you see a news story about a recall, you should increase your visibility because that is what brings people into the market for information. If your product is very seasonal, such as gardening tools or bathing suits, you can use Google Trends to look for which countries might make sense to expand into in order to add width to your seasonality. For example, you will find that the UK has less seasonality than the US because of their more temperate climate so extending to this area may help your garden tool business. You might want to add Australia distribution to your bathing suit business after checking to confirm that searches for swim wear in Australia follows their climate which is about the opposite of the U.S. Give it a try. You will find many ways to look at and think about your marketplace once you begin working with this very useful free analytic tool.

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