What's Trending?
Welcome to What’s Trending – in this lesson I will show you how to use a free tool called ‘Google Trends’ to find and analyse data – which is key information to look at when creating a business online.
An Introduction to Google Trends
In this example I will pretend that I own a clothing brand and I’ve noticed the socks department is struggling for sales, so I’ll use Google Trends to tell me which types of socks are popular.
The first thing we do is head to Google Trends and search the term socks.
You can see that the data shown is for United KIngdom over the past 12 months – but my customers are based all over the world so let’s change this to Worldwide and past 5 years.
Looking at large history data gives us a better understanding of how a product has changed over time so this is why I like to choose a five year period.
We can see that socks are very seasonal and peak every December, the classic christmas socks purchases!
The next data set is a heatmap view and a top five table.
This data is very useful when choosing your marketing strategy – for example if you where running Facebook Ads this info shows you where to direct your marketing.
Scrolling down to the bottom of the page you will see ‘Related Topics & Related Queries’ with both having drop down options (Rising or Top)
I personally don’t spend too much time here – you may get a search term or query you want to look into but I’m more interested in the visual data from above.
Let’s look at a comparison between Mens Socks and Womens Socks.
Looking at the data Mens socks are more popular than Womens socks – and looking at the location data for Mens socks we can see potentially where we would aim our marketing if we had an online store.
Finally let’s check sock types – in this example I will search a comparison between (invisble socks, crew socks and hiking socks)
Clearly on this occasion the search term Crew Socks are way more popular.
I would have one last check on the region/city data of crew socks then compile a marketing plan.
To end this section the mens crew sock was looking like a popular choice – you may want to take it further and look into sock colours and do a comparison search on white socks vs black socks vs colour socks.
Conclusion:
I hope this quick tutorial was useful to you and that you can see the potential in using Google Trends.
In the next lesson we will take our list of niches and use Google Trends to help us choose our niche.