Google Trends for Marketing & Sales

Hi, I'm Daniel Waisberg, search advocate at Google.
And I'm Omri Weisman, Google Trends engineering manager.
In this video, we'll help you use search data
to create successful marketing and sales strategies
and to improve your business, whether online offline or both.
We'll share techniques such as benchmarking against competitors,
analyzing brand awareness and forecasting your inventory demand.
If you haven't watched the other videos in this series,
make sure to check them out
to learn more about how to use Google Trends.
Google Trends can help you market and sell your products.
To explain and illustrate the different techniques,
we have created a fictitious store.
I'm so excited about this!
Cheese Nuts!
A gourmet store for people that are nuts about cheese.
For the purpose of this exercise,
the store will operate in the United States.
We'll discuss four ways to improve your business using Google Trends,
understanding overall vertical trends, benchmarking against competitors,
analyzing brand awareness and sentiment,
and researching keywords for ad campaigns.
Let's dive into the world of cheese.
The first thing you want to do
is check what types of cheese people are searching for,
to make sure you're offering them on your store.
You can do this by visiting trends.google.com
and trying a few cheese types.
Let's start with brie, cheddar, provolone,
parmesan and mozzarella.
Notice how I selected the topics, not just the search terms,
topics aggregate across languages and include misspellings,
variations and acronyms related to it.
If we take a look at the chart,
you can see at a glance
that maybe we shouldn't focus too much on provolone
as there seems to be little interest in it.
So let's remove it from this comparison.
Let's take a look at the remaining cheese types.
You can see that parmesan has the highest interest
and it's growing over time.
Brie is highly seasonal.
People in the US seem to enjoy brie for the Thanksgiving
and winter holiday meals.
Mozzarella is pretty constant
and cheddar experiences a slight increase between October and February.
This kind of analysis can help you plan
what products to make available on your website,
depending on the time of the year and can come in handy
when managing your stock if you have a physical store.
You should use this information to forecast your inventory demand,
making sure that you always have the products
your customers are most likely to purchase.
This data can also help you plan your content.
For example, you could prepare a few blog posts
discussing brie related recipes or ideas before the holidays.
This might help you direct more traffic to your store from Google Search.
We discussed this in depth on the Google Trends for SEOs video.
Check it out if you haven't already.
The web is a massive place
and there are many businesses competing for search presence.
This competition will influence how much traffic you get from Google.
With Google Trends,
you can start benchmarking against your competitors
from the very beginning of your journey.
A common step before opening up a new store
is doing market research to understand how much demand
and how much supply currently exists in your market.
So let's assume you have a list of potential competitors.
Suppose your stronger competitor is Cheese King.
Add the name to Google Trends.
And if there is an option for a topic, choose it.
If not, just enter the search term.
Looking at the results,
you can see how well your competitor is doing in comparison to you over time.
Unfortunately, for now, they're doing much better.
When you scroll down,
you can compare how strong you are for each of the subregions,
metro areas and cities available.
And this could help you gather data when deciding where to open a new store.
You can also see what people are searching for
in connection with your competitor.
Maybe they're doing really well with a certain topic or search term
that you have not even considered.
This can give you ideas on how to expand your content.
As your business grows,
customers might discuss your brand on the web.
Well, I hope it will always be positive, sometimes this might not be the case.
To monitor what people are saying about you,
you should check your brand name using Google Trends.
And it might be a good idea to track this both on Google Search
and YouTube.
Enter your business name on Google Trends and change the time range
to the past 30 or 90 days.
Then scroll down the page to see the related search terms card.
Go through both the rising and the top terms on the list
and make sure to paginate using the arrows below the table.
This will give you a good idea of the terms people are using
in connection with your brand.
To check the same information for YouTube,
use the filter at the top of the page.
This will provide you with details on youtube search trends
related to your brand.
In a previous episode, we discussed keyword research for SEO.
This is the practice of identifying words and phrases your audience uses
to search for information you offer on your website.
Check out the links in the description to learn more about it.
In addition to finding keywords for your SEO efforts,
you can also use trends in a similar way to find ideas to expand ad campaigns.
I work on search, but experts here say that the first step you should take
is to analyze your ad campaign performance,
trying to find which keywords are the most profitable.
Following your analysis, choose the keywords
with the highest return on investment, the famous ROI,
and check them on Google Trends.
For example, suppose you're focusing on the keyword cheese platter.
Add this term to trends
and choose a topic to get more variations of this term.
You'll notice that this was quite popular around 2021
and that it also has a strong seasonality usually peaking between October and January.
If you scroll down,
you'll find the related topics and the related queries cards.
Here, you can check the top topics to find ideas
on what has already gathered a lot of interest
and also the rising topics to get a sense
on what is getting more attention lately.
Don't forget to look further through the pagination available.
Notice how charcuterie appears on both lists.
Add this term to your analysis.
You'll see that it has significantly more interest than cheese platters.
Maybe you should consider analyzing this term further
and potentially diversifying.
I'm getting really excited about the cheese store.
It's such a good idea.
Me too, Daniel.
But if you eat all the cheese now we won't have anything to sell.
Oh, I'm sorry, I'm nuts about cheese.
We hope you got some good ideas about how to use Trends
to market and sell your products online.
To summarize, there are four techniques you can start with:
Understand overall vertical trends to plan what products to make available
on your website, depending on the time of the year.
Benchmark against competitors
to get ideas on how to expand your content.
Analyze brand awareness and sentiment, to monitor what people are saying about you.
And research keywords to enhance your ad campaigns.
Don't forget to subscribe to the Google Search Central YouTube channel
to be the first to watch our upcoming videos.
Stay tuned.