Google Trends can be a great source of insights to help guide your content strategy and understand which subjects are gaining momentum online. And now, Google is adding some new tricks to the Trends application, providing additional insights based on more specific search behaviors around each topic.
It works like this – as explained by Google:
“Say you’re curious about search interest in Taylor Swift following the recent release of her latest album. You now have the option to explore that data in different ways, like finding the related videos that people are searching for on YouTube.”
To use the new filter options, you first search Google Trends as normal, entering in your search term/s and, where applicable, choosing the right match from the autocomplete suggestions.
Search for the topic and you’ll still get your normal Google Trends overview, with interest over time and by region. But click on the ‘Web search’ drop-down and you’ll see a new listing of specific search options, including image searches, video searches and Google Shopping results.
These new sources provide more insights into exactly how and why a topic is getting attention – in this example, Google shows that a recent performance by Swift on ‘The Tonight Show’ was gaining momentum on YouTube.
Being able to track the search results more specifically can help provide more context as to exactly what people are looking for – which could have particular marketing benefit when analyzing Google Shopping data.
For example, if I look up ‘Nike’ and use the Google Shopping filter, I can narrow my search by region, and see a listing of the specific searches, showing me the most popular sneaker types, based on search volume, at any given time.
There’s a range of ways this data can be used – and worth noting, when you do use these new filters, all the region and related topic data is relative to the subset you’re checking. So if you’re using the YouTube Search filter, all the data displayed is related to YouTube searches specifically.
As noted, Google Trends is a valuable research tool. It's often misused - showing a trend chart by itself is misleading, as a spike in searches needs to be viewed against some comparative measure to get a true handle on interest – but the potential value of Google Trends data shouldn’t be underestimated.
These new filters add more tools with which to sort the data, further improving the potential benefits.