[Video] How to use Google Trends for Market Research

What’s the best kept secret at Google? Probably the Google Trends market research software.

If you’re thinking of developing a new business, product, or service, Google Trends is worth examining. It’s free, very easy to use, and gives you a nice insight into how Google predicts what’s hot, and what’s not.

You can also look at historical data and so forecasts.

So, if you work in Marketing, Product Development or are just curious about what trends are coming around the corner, head over to www.google.com/trends and get started.

In this video tutorial, we use Google Trends to:

  1. Compare the amount of searches, ie popularity, of Google Docs compared to Microsoft Word
  2. The rise and fall of Manchester United against Manchester City
  3. Excel v Google Sheets v Spreadsheets and
  4. Cloud Computing to demonstrate how popular this has become in the last five years.

Other features to note in Google Trends are:

  1. Forecasting engine – the anticipated interested in a product, topic, service based on current usage patterns
  2. Data export to Excel, PDF, and CSV for number crunching and data analysis
  3. Social Media sharing – post the trending topic out to your Twitter, Facebook and other social media accounts
  4. Alerts – keep track of the trend by setting up Google Alerts every day, week, or month

How do I use Google Trends?

  1. To compare my gut feeling about something against Google’s hard data.
  2. To compare different products, especially in different regions
  3. To help clients develop products. If data suggests that market has tired of product or interest appears to be flagging, we look at what’s replaced it.

Summary

I’m not recommending that you use Google Trends to shape your marketing plans. Far from it. But if Google is part of your marketing strategy, then it doesn’t hurt to examine how it views the world.

A final tip: you can get a more rounded view of these trends by examining the topic in Google Adwords. Adwords is also free and shows the price (based on interest) of different keywords. If you see that something is about to take off, then maybe buy a block of ads while the cost is relatively low.