Google Trends has been helping webmasters and business owner’s better target an audience and marketing strategy for years now. To keep it short, Google Trends essentially tells you what people are searching for on the internet at that moment, day or month. For example, today, September 18th, 2013, the #1 trend is iOS7 due to Apples launch of their new operating system. Google Trends became such a hit with webmasters and general internet users that they have been expanding on its functionality.
A few months back in May of 2013, Google Trends released Top Charts, which allows users to get real-time data on what is trending based on different categories like Actors, Athletes, Countries or Music. Google Trends just released some new features that are sure to interest all sorts of users browsing the web by updating the Top Charts to be able to show what’s trending by search volume, but also what’s increasing compared to usual search volume. For example, in August 2013, the most searched Athlete was Lamar Odom. However, when you click on trending Athletes, Jason Dufner is #1 because people are searching his name more than usual and he is on the rise.
Also new to Google Trends is the new 30-day calendar layout that allows you to visually see what was trending on each particular day. You can go all the way back to January 2004 to find out what was trending almost a decade ago. This can be useful for marketers that are trying to pick up on monthly or season trends. Say you are looking for a marketing strategy for October 2013, you can go back and look at each October for the last 9 years and see what was trending and try to pick up any trends or similarities in your industry to target. Furthermore, you have the ability to click on each day to see a comprehensive list of what was trending that day.
Google currently only has this function for the United States, but plans to unveil about a dozen more countries in the coming weeks. By adding these new countries, you can see what is trending in other countries if your business is international.
Finally, Google has updated the look of Google Trends to make it look similar to Google search. Users will now have the ability to search data for any topic, and then use it to compare how it trends by region, time and category. Google Trends is a free tool that is extremely powerful and versatile, so I recommend taking the time to explore what it has to offer and how it can help your business.
By Mike Fedotowsky