Google Trends for Journalists

Welcome to another Google Trends tutorials episode.
I'm Daniel Waisberg, Search Advocate at Google.
And I'm Hadas Jacobi, Google Trends Engineer.
In this video, we'll talk about how to use Google Trends
to help journalists create stories based on search interest.
We'll discuss how to come up with data-driven newsworthy stories
and how to plan your content strategy
to satisfy your audience's needs for content ahead of time.
And lastly, we'll show some examples of stories powered by Google Trends data
that we hope will inspire you to create interesting stories.
If you haven't watched the previous episodes in this series,
make sure to check them out to learn more about how to use Google Trends.
We have a lot of videos for you to binge on.
Google Trends is a powerful tool for journalism.
The scale of the available data can provide insights into billions of Google
and YouTube searches every day,
with global reach and regional granularity.
The freshness of the results makes it possible
to find the most relevant trend within just a few minutes.
And the honesty of how people search for answers creates a true representation
of what they really care about.
The combination of these elements makes Google Trends
a gold mine for journalists
looking for inspiration to create and enhance their stories.
Let's say you cover weather events for a news broadcaster,
and you're working on an article exploring recent natural disasters.
The focus of the piece is to provide an overview on what people
in different countries find interesting in regards to this topic.
So you pick four countries that are relevant for your audience.
For this example, we'll take France, Germany, United Kingdom, and United States.
To start your analysis, search for these terms on Google Trends
for the available time frame, starting in 2004.
As you see in this graph, the topic Storms does not seem to generate much interest.
Let's see what happens if we replace it with Tropical Cyclone,
which is a type of storm that includes the common term Hurricane.
Side note, notice that I'm using topics, not search terms.
A topic is a group of search terms, which we also call an entity.
It includes the exact term searched as well as misspellings, variants,
acronyms, and it covers all languages, which is useful when looking at global data.
For example, if we look at Flood as a topic and then as a search term,
you'll notice how the topic has a higher search interest.
That's because it covers many search terms related to the topic.
Back to the comparison,
and just for reference, the highest spike in search interest
over the selected period
relates to the earthquakes in Turkey in February 2023.
A close second was Hurricane Irma,
a hurricane that caused widespread destruction
across its path in September 2017.
At this point, you might want to download the data into a CSV
and combine it with other datasets.
For example, you can match each spike in the line chart
to the relevant natural disaster
and create an annotated chart with their details.
In addition to the comparison of search interest over time,
you can also find a comparison breakdown by region
of the search interest for the disasters.
This map shows you which topic has the highest search interest
for each of the countries.
Notice that you can check the box below the map
if you want to include low search volume regions too.
This map can be an impactful visual alongside an article.
If you're publishing the article online,
you may embed the map into the page to offer an interactive version
with live updates directly on your site.
And finally, after the comparison by region,
you'll find for each individual topic, a map showing its interest by region,
and a table with related queries,
where you can check both the rising and the top queries
in relation to each topic.
Hadass has done a comparison between the way people search
for natural disasters.
We can now build on that to check if there are any differences
between search interest in each of your focus countries.
The first step is to create an advanced future
to show the trends over time
for each of the topics in each of the countries.
I'll start with floods.
Type in Flood in the Google Trends search box and choose the topic flood disaster type.
Choose United States and pick the date range starting in 2004.
In the second search box, type in Flood and choose the same topic.
Now hover over that search box and click the three dots menu.
Select Change Futures and then change the country
to the United Kingdom.
Repeat the same process for Germany and France.
This chart shows the search interest in Flood since 2004,
where each line represents a different country.
We can see in the bar chart that the UK has the highest search interest
among the countries.
You'll notice that most spikes originate from the UK searches around their winter.
This knowledge can help you plan your content ahead.
Scrolling down, for each of the countries, you'll see a map with search interest
broken down by sub-region,
where darker shaded areas have a higher level of search interest.
You'll also find the table with queries related to that specific topic.
You can choose either the most popular ones,
or the ones with the biggest increase in search frequency
to understand people's behavior around this topic.
You can repeat this process for tropical cyclones,
where you'll see that the United States
has significantly more search interest than the other countries.
The spike you see in the chart for September 2017
coincides with Hurricane Irma.
Search interests originated mostly from U.S. searches.
Finally, if you repeat this process for earthquakes,
you'll see a significant spike in February 2023,
as a result of the earthquakes in Turkey.
Most of the search interest for that event originated in Germany.
As you can see, you can extract a lot of interesting data from these comparisons.
There are so many compelling stories
that can be distilled from an analysis like this.
Now you have some idea about how to gather and analyze data for a story you're covering.
However, as a weather reporter, you will always encounter breaking stories.
A well-defined content strategy should combine planning ahead
of special moments throughout the year
while also allowing some bandwidth to monitor and report about breaking news.
Let's start with special moments.
These are recurring events that people search for every year.
You should have a calendar marking the date you already know,
like the change in seasons throughout the year.
For example, do you know what people search for in relation to spring?
Is it different from what people search for in relation to the summer?
Maybe they're interested in seasonal weather-related topics.
That's something you should explore.
So maybe leave some time aside to have content ready before
people start getting interested in the changing of the seasons.
We discussed how to create a content calendar in the Trends for SEO episode.
Watch it to learn more.
But while you can go a long way by planning ahead,
you can't plan for breaking news.
You just need to be on top of things.
A good way to start is to take a quick look at what's trending when you start your day.
Navigate to Trending now.
In this page, you'll see which terms are trending in the past seven days,
24 hours, or even in the last hour.
This is a great way for you to find breaking news
and gather ideas for news articles.
For example, during a recent eclipse,
there was a lot of search interest for the term, My eyes hurt.
This shows how Google Trends can bring color to what's going on in the world
by surfacing people's immediate responses to news events.
This is something you could have seen while preparing for your day,
and maybe you could have written a short piece about it as it happened.
Once you find a search term that looks like an interesting rising trend,
you can investigate it further.
Add the turn to the Explore page and choose the past 24 hours
to monitor how the search interest is trending.
Here are a few questions you can answer using the data.
Is there a specific region where this term is becoming popular?
Does it correlate with an important piece of ongoing news?
Was there another peak in the history of this term,
or is this a completely new trend?
When you look at related queries, what are searchers asking in relation to it?
What sort of coverage is this topic getting?
Is there a gap in the coverage my publication might want to fill?
Put on your detective hat, and off you go into the world of data.
Before we leave you to play around with the tool,
I would like to highlight a few real-life examples
of data visualizations created with Google Trends data.
Those data stories might inspire you even more.
We have also added links to the video description
if you want to learn more about them.
First example is searching for health,
a tool that compares search interests for common health issues in the United States
to the actual location of occurrences for those same health conditions.
The visualization shows how search data reflects life for millions of Americans.
Second, a sports example.
How the world is searching for the World Cup, which leverage Google Search interest
to identify trends throughout the 2022 World Cup.
It shows the most search teams over the course of the tournament,
players ranked by search interest, and the most searched national team
in each country.
Last, the alternative Olympics Medal Table.
This is a visualization showing what would happen
if the Olympic medals were re-ranked based on other factors
like population size, wealth, or search interest.
Hadas, I'm so glad we checked Google Trends
and brought our ponchos to avoid getting drenched in the rain.
Yeah, having a figure on the pulse of breaking news
can be very important to help people understand what's happening around them.
And what's better?
Google Trends can help not us,
but journalists preparing data-driven news stories
and news companies creating their content strategy.
Don't forget to subscribe to the Google Search Central YouTube channel
to be the first to watch our upcoming videos.
And stay tuned.