Since launching Insights for Search in 2008, Google have been providing daily insight into what the world is searching for. Looking at search volume trends across categories, geographic regions and time can help you understand when, where and how the world's interests have changed. This data can help to provide quick, real time insights when planning your marketing campaigns. Here are just a few ways to use Insights for Search.

1) Regional Targeting

By looking at regional data you can analyse the location of your target audience, or do a comparison of different regions to help decide where to target your campaign. This can help to answer questions such as “Where are my target audience located?” and “Which are the most important areas to focus my marketing budget?”
Let’s say, you want to sell snow boots in the UK. Typing ‘Snow boots’ into Insights for Search shows that England has had the highest search volumes over the last 12 months. If you use the sub regional filter of England you can see that popularity is highest in places such as Thames Ditton, Reading, Milton Keynes & Manchester so you may want to up-weight your campaign in these areas.


2) Seasonal Insights

Analysing search volume over time can highlight some important seasonality insights. Often these insights are intuitive and Insights for Search can help back up that hunch. You can look into seasonality of a particular topic such as summer holidays to see that there are a clear spikes of interest in January and then again in April before the June-July last minute rush.


3) Category Insights

You can also look into seasonal patterns for an industry or category, for instance, you work in the retirement and pensions business, a quick search over time shows that there is a spike in search volumes Jan – March. You can also see from rising searches that people are looking for information on what they are entitled to, pension’s forecasts & calculators and benefits. This can help structure both when you target your campaign but also what message may resonate best with your audience.


4) Competitor Insights

Quickly compare interest in your brand vs your competitors. Simply add a search term for each brand and you can compare the search volumes within a given time, region and category. You can also view search volume growth relative to the given category, so you may find that a brand with the smallest search volumes is actually growing at a faster rate than the rest. Keep an eye on the top searches within the category too as this list can be a good indicator of popular brands within your category.


5) Product Insights

For companies with many products under one brand, Insights for Search can show you which product have higher search ‘interest’. This can provide insights to help structure your portfolio, which products to focus your budget on and when.


6) Online/Offline marketing

Insights for search can be used to indicate whether there is a correlation between your offline media activity and online search patterns. Simply map your offline investment by month against a relevant search for the same time period and you can quickly see if a pattern emerges. Use this tool to gauge success of your campaign – have search volumes changed since the campaign start date?

So much real time information at your finger tips. So next time you’re planning a marketing campaign, thinking about budgeting, or just trying to gauge public interest, try Insights for Search. It’s amazing how much can be achieved for free!

Posted by Rosie Rankin, Agency Team

Google Ad Planner is a free media planning tool that can help you identify websites your audience is likely to visit. It is also a tool that allows you to quickly see who your brand’s audience is based on who visits your site.


Visit Ad Planner and go to the search by tab. Type your site into the search box and click the arrow to the right. The results will show you:

• Site traffic, including unique visitors (users), unique visitors (estimated cookies or cookies), reach, page views, total visits, and more.
• Audience characteristics (gender, age, education, and household income).
• Other sites your audience is likely to visit.
• Other keywords your audience is likely to search for.

With Google Ad planner you can also find our what other sites your audience is likely to visit. Go to the search by audience tab. Here you can define your audience by geography, language, demographic and interests. You can also look at online activity. So you can ask, of those who visit my site, what other sites do they visit? For each site that appears you get statistics on the number of unique visitors, page views and other data.

You can then create lists of websites that suit your objective, store them in a media plan and even get aggregated statistics for your media plan.

Visit Ad Planner today and have a go.

Posted by Rosie Rankin, Agency Team

Google Reader can be used as a powerful aggregator of multiple sources of information which mention your product or brand. Google Reader is a free tool from Google which allows you to stay up-to-date with the content from any site which publishes to the web using a feed or RSS*. It can be tough monitoring and tracking mentions of your product, brand or service in multiple locations, so to help we've put together a list of examples of how you can let Google Reader do the work for you. With a little setting up, we've found Google Reader not only saves time and effort but makes reading and sharing stuff on the web fun too.

Here are some examples of ways you can keep tabs on mentions of your product or brand on the Internet with Google Reader:

• Set up a Google Alert for your product and subscribe to it in Google Reader to see a range of updates from the web.
• Subscribe to the latest posts from your competitors' blogs to make sure you don't inadvertently miss something important! Just look for the RSS logo on their site.
• Subscribe to Google Blog Search and Google News Search results for your brand or product in Google Reader to see what top publishers and bloggers are saying. In Blog Search you'll find the feed to the left of the search results; in Google News, you'll see the feed at the bottom of the page.
• Create a Twitter Search for your product and subscribe in Google Reader to see what consumers are saying on the popular micro-blogging service. You'll see a 'Feed for this Query' button on the right hand side of the search results.

With all these feeds, the easiest way to add them to Google Reader is to copy the URL of the feed, go to Google Reader and paste it in the 'Add a Subscription' box. (More help here). And voila! Now mentions of your product or brand will be collected for you in one place. Got some more suggestions for updates to subscribe to using Google Reader? Let us know.

Posted by Dom Elliott, UK B2B Marketing Team

*What's an RSS feed? Feeds let websites distribute their content much more widely by inviting users to subscribe to regular updates delivered via their method of choice e.g. web portal, news reader or email. Google Reader is one such news reader designed to let you easily collect and read your RSS subscriptions. Learn more.

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

Since launching Google Insights for Search a year ago, we've been providing daily insight into what the world is searching for. Whether you're an advertiser looking to expand keyword lists, an economist analyzing economic trends or just looking to settle a popularity contest, Google Insights for Search can help provide the answers.

Looking at search trends helps you understand when, where and how the world's interests have changed. Simply type in search terms to see how search query volume has evolved over time, in which geographic regions search interest is greatest and other related searches.

Today, we are proud to announce that Insights for Search is now available in 39 languages around the world. We're also introducing a forecasting feature for some queries based on an extrapolation of the historical trends and search patterns. And to help you visualize these changes and trends, we've also added an animated map so you can watch how search interest changes over time in different locations.

You can check out some of these cool features in our video below.



Visit Google Insights for Search and see what the world is searching for. You can also keep on top of the latest trends by adding a customizable gadget to your iGoogle page or embedding a gadget directly on your website.

Posted by Hal Varian, Chief Economist and Yossi Matias, Head of Israel R&D Center to the Official Google Blog

First in a series of "How-to Guides", these posts will explore the use of our free Google tools to gather insights for planning - Ed.

Here in the Google UK Public Sector team, Swine Flu is currently top of our agenda. Our brand new team was set up specifically to work with Government departments in achieving their online objectives - and it’s a fascinating area. Today we might be trying to reduce knife crime; tomorrow, helping the Navy to garner more recruits.

Interestingly, many of our strategies are relevant for both the public and private sector. Although we may not be trying to sell our audience a product or service, we are usually working towards driving an end objective such as a .pdf download or mailing list sign up.

One such area of public / private sector crossover is search budgeting. No matter if the client is selling sports shoes or informing the public of flu symptoms, it is essential that future search marketing budgets are planned with seasonality in mind.

So how can we do this with any certainty? In the past, this kind of research might have been outsourced at a cost. Nowadays, all marketers have a great deal of information at their fingertips - for free - with Google’s Insights for Search.

Let’s take the example of a travel agent looking to sell holidays in the sun:

Research steps
1) Go to www.google.com/insights/search
2) Enter “summer holiday” as the search term
3) Set Country to “United Kingdom” and hit “Search”


The results – perhaps predictably – show spikes of interest around January (those planning ahead) and at the beginning of the summer season:


We can, therefore, see this data as a barometer of public interest in a given topic over time. But what does this mean for budgeting? Well, the vertical axis of the graph above shows “normalised” search query volumes. So a score of 100% on the graph means ‘the greatest number of queries of that type made in the time period you’ve selected’, relative to all queries made on Google’s search engine.

Using just the graph above, a media planner can easily deduce the following:

• Search popularity for “summer holiday” was at a 4-year high in July 2006.
• Peak-season popularity for “summer holiday” in the UK last year was up around 10% on the year before.
• Last year’s July popularity was just 3% lower than the July 2006 figure.

With these facts in mind, the media planner might decide to budget a little more than last year in case of a further growth in demand.

Dig deeper and Insights for Search illustrates powerful correlations between search and media coverage. Last week, whilst preparing a presentation for a public sector client, I wanted to demonstrate how public interest in Swine Flu has changed over time:


Clicking “show” beside the “News Headlines” option reveals links to related media stories, giving fascinating insight into how the public have reacted to press coverage of Swine Flu.

But that’s not all. Comparing data from different queries reveals further remarkable correlations. Here, we compare searches for “swine flu” and “hand sanitizer” over the same three month period:



The results show incredibly similar growth in popularity.

Key take-aways? Next time you’re planning a marketing campaign, thinking about budgeting, or just trying to gauge public interest, try combining Insights for Search with a little imagination. It’s amazing how much can be achieved for free!

Posted by Jono Layton, Public Sector & Government Team