market research with google trends

How to Use Google Trends for Market Research in 2024

Updated on July 17, 2024

Staying ahead of the curve is crucial in the fast-paced world of marketing. Understanding market trends, consumer behavior, and competitors can make or break a business. But how do you gain these insights without breaking the bank? Enter Google Trends , a free tool that can revolutionize your market research strategy. This blog post will walk you through the ins and outs of using Google Trends for market research in 2024, helping you leverage data insights for informed business decisions.

What Is Google Trends?

Google Trends is a free tool offered by Google that allows you to see how often specific terms are searched for on Google over time. This provides valuable insights into what people are interested in and what questions they’re asking. Think of it as a giant search bar where you can see how popular a topic has been over a specific period and how it compares to other topics.

Why Use Google Trends for Market Research?

Market research is all about understanding your target audience and their needs. Google Trends offers a wealth of information that can be incredibly helpful in this regard. Here’s a quick glimpse into some key benefits:

Identify Trending Topics: See what’s hot and what’s not! Google Trends can reveal rising search terms, allowing you to capitalize on emerging trends and tailor your products or services accordingly.
Understand Customer Demand: Gauge the level of interest in your niche or product category. This helps you determine market viability and potential areas for growth.
Inform Content Strategy: Discover what kind of content resonates with your audience. Use search trends to create content that addresses their questions and interests.
Compare Competitors: See how your brand stacks up against the competition. Analyze search trends for your brand compared to your competitors to identify strategic opportunities.

These are just a few reasons why Google Trends is a powerful tool for market research. In the next section, we’ll delve deeper into how to leverage this tool for actionable insights.

Uses of Google Trends for Market Research

Google Trends offers a multitude of applications that can provide a comprehensive understanding of the market landscape. From consumer interests to competitive analysis, the tool can be a game-changer for market research.

Identifying Seasonal Trends

One of the most powerful features of Google Trends is its ability to identify seasonal trends. Seasonal trends can significantly impact your marketing strategy, product launches, and inventory management. Recognizing these patterns allows businesses to align their efforts with consumer behavior, leading to increased sales and better customer satisfaction.

For example, let’s say you’re running an e-commerce store that sells swimwear. By analyzing seasonal trends, you can determine the peak times when consumers are most likely to search for swimwear.

This insight allows you to strategically plan your marketing campaigns, ensuring that you reach your target audience at the optimal time. You can also manage your stock inventory more effectively to meet the expected surge in demand, preventing stockouts or overstock situations. Additionally, you can time your new product launches to coincide with these peak periods, maximizing their impact and visibility.

Exploring Keyword Popularity

Understanding keyword popularity is essential for any marketing strategy. Google Trends allows you to compare the popularity of different keywords over time, helping you choose the best keywords for your SEO strategy. Knowing which keywords are trending enables you to create content that resonates with your audience and ranks higher in search engine results.

For instance, if you’re running a blog for digital nomads who work from home, you can use Google Trends to compare keywords like “remote work setups” and “home office decor”. This comparison can help you reveal trending topics that became more relevant during the pandemic, guiding content strategy.

By focusing on trending keywords, you can attract more organic traffic to your blog, engage your audience with relevant topics, and ultimately drive better results for your marketing efforts.

Analyzing Geographical Data

Location-based marketing is becoming increasingly important in today’s globalized market. Google Trends provides geographical data that shows where specific search terms are most popular. This information can be incredibly useful for local businesses or for companies looking to expand into new markets. By understanding geographical trends, businesses can tailor their marketing strategies to the preferences and needs of consumers in different regions.

Suppose you own a chain of coffee shops and are planning to expand to a new city. By using Google Trends, you can analyze the popularity of search terms like “best coffee shops” in different locations. This data can help you identify which cities have a high demand for coffee shops, allowing you to make an informed decision about where to open your next location.

Moreover, you can customize your marketing messages and promotional offers to suit the tastes and preferences of customers in each specific area, increasing your chances of success in the new market.

Monitoring Competitor Activity

Keeping an eye on your competitors is crucial for staying competitive in today’s fast-paced market. Google Trends allows you to monitor the search interest for your competitors’ brand names and products over time. This tool provides valuable insights into their popularity, seasonal trends, and market share fluctuations.

For example, if you’re a smartphone manufacturer, you can use Google Trends to compare the search interest for your brand with that of your competitors like Apple, Samsung, or Huawei. This comparison can help you gauge your brand’s performance, understand market dynamics, and identify areas for improvement or innovation. Additionally, monitoring competitor activity can alert you to emerging trends or shifts in consumer preferences that you might need to address.

Product Research and Development

Google Trends can also be a valuable tool for product research and development, offering insights that go beyond traditional market research methods. By analyzing search trends, you can identify gaps in the market, discover emerging consumer needs, and uncover new product opportunities.

Let’s say you’re in the beauty industry and are considering launching a new skincare product. By analyzing search trends for keywords like “skincare routines” and “best skincare products,” you can identify the most popular types of products and ingredients. This data can guide your product development process, helping you to create products that meet current consumer demands. You could also track trends over time to see if certain ingredients or skincare routines are gaining traction, which can increase the chances of a successful product launch.

Enhancing Content Strategy

Content is king, but only if it’s relevant and timely. Google Trends can help you create content that resonates with your audience by identifying trending topics and search queries in real time.

For instance, if you’re running a travel blog, you can use Google Trends to find out which travel destinations are currently trending. This information can guide your content creation process, ensuring that you’re writing about topics that are of current interest to your audience.

Additionally, you can use Google Trends to identify seasonal trends or recurring interests, allowing you to plan your content calendar effectively. By staying on top of what your audience is interested in, you can increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site.

Market Analysis and Forecasting

Google Trends can provide valuable data for market analysis and forecasting, helping businesses to anticipate market changes and adjust their strategies accordingly. By examining long-term search trends, you can gain insights into how consumer interest in certain products or services is evolving.

For example, if you’re in the renewable energy sector, you can track search trends for terms like “solar energy” or “wind power” to understand how interest in these technologies is growing. This information can help you forecast future demand and make informed decisions about product development, marketing, and resource allocation.

Customer Insights and Behavior

Understanding customer interests and behaviors through Google Trends can help you develop effective marketing strategies.

For example, a retailer can use Google Trends to track search interest in various product categories, such as “summer fashion” or “holiday gifts.” This information can help you to tailor your marketing campaigns, optimize your product offerings, and enhance customer engagement by aligning with current trends and consumer preferences.

Crisis Management

In times of crisis, understanding what people are searching for can help you respond appropriately and effectively. Google Trends offers real-time data on emerging issues, allowing businesses and organizations to address concerns promptly and accurately. Using this tool, you can gain insights into the public’s changing interests and needs, enabling you to adapt your strategies accordingly.

For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses turned to Google Trends to track searches related to “remote work” and “COVID-19 safety measures.” This data allowed them to adapt their marketing strategies, implement necessary safety protocols, and communicate effectively with their audience. By staying informed about what people were searching for, these businesses could provide relevant products, services, and information during a critical time.

Optimizing Paid Advertising Campaigns

Paid advertising can be expensive, but Google Trends can help you optimize your campaigns by identifying the most effective keywords and timing for your ads. This tool provides valuable insights into consumer behavior, enabling you to make data-driven decisions that enhance your advertising efforts.

Suppose you’re running a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign for a new product. By analyzing search trends for related keywords, you can identify the peak times when people are searching for those terms. This allows you to schedule your ads for maximum impact, ensuring they reach the right audience at the right time. Additionally, understanding search trends can help you refine your ad copy and targeting options, ultimately improving your return on investment (ROI).

Refining Brand Messaging

Refine brand messaging by aligning with popular language and keywords identified through Google Trends.

For example, if you’re in the fitness industry, you can use Google Trends to analyze search trends for keywords like “workout routines” and “fitness tips.” This data not only reveals what topics are currently trending but also provides insights into seasonal fluctuations and regional differences. By aligning your messaging with what your audience is actively searching for, you can significantly increase the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and build a more engaged customer base.

Competitive Benchmarking

Understanding how your brand compares to competitors is essential for strategic planning and market positioning. Google Trends benchmarks brand performance against competitors, revealing market opportunities.

For instance, if you’re in the fashion industry, you can use Google Trends to compare the search interest for your brand with that of your competitors. This comparison can help you identify emerging trends, seasonal peaks, and potential gaps in the market. By understanding these dynamics, you can adjust your strategy to capitalize on opportunities for growth and stay ahead of the competition. Additionally, continuous monitoring can alert you to shifts in consumer behavior and preferences, enabling you to adapt quickly and maintain a competitive edge.

In today’s competitive business landscape, market research is more important than ever. Google Trends offers a powerful, free tool that can provide valuable insights into consumer behavior, seasonal trends, geographical data, and more. By leveraging Google Trends, marketers, business owners, and entrepreneurs can make data-driven decisions that enhance their strategies and drive success.

Ready to take your market research to the next level? Start using Google Trends today and discover the insights that can propel your business forward. For more tips and resources on market research and digital marketing, visit our blog or contact our team of experts.

Happy researching!

Alice Ananian

Alice has over 8 years experience as a strong communicator and creative thinker. She enjoys helping companies refine their branding, deepen their values, and reach their intended audiences through language.

How to Do Market Research: A Comprehensive Guide for 2024

by Alice Ananian
Updated on September 4, 2024

Survey Frauds: Are Bots Ruining Market Research?

Updated on October 2, 2024

How to use Google Trends for Market Research (2024)

Market research is incredibly important for businesses of all sizes. Unfortunately, many of the market research methods can be expensive and extremely time-consuming. Thanks to the widespread usage of the internet, market research tools have become more accessible to all businesses. In this article, we will focus on how to use Google Trends for market research.

What is Google Trends?

Google Trends is a free tool developed by Google that shows users how often different search terms are entered into Google’s search engine compared to total search volumes over chosen time periods.

Google Trends gives users the possibility to analyze search term popularity over time, explore similar keywords and compare how popular a search term is in different regions of the world. Google Trends can also be used to discover spikes in keyword search volumes which are usually triggered by real-world events.

Here are 4 methods on how to use Google Trends of market research.

1. Use Google Trends to find popular topics in your industry

Google Trends can help you discover popular topics you might have missed in your industry. Here’s how you can find popular topics and search queries in your industry.

Go to trends.google.com

Step 1 : Navigate to Explore .

Step 2: Select the Region you want to explore. You can focus on a whole country, state or a city – possibilities are endless here.

Step 3: Choose the time range you want to research. If you want to see more overarching topics of your industry, choose a longer time frame and if you want to discover newer topics or queries, choose a lesser time frame.

Step 4: Choose your category . For example, if you work in marketing, you might choose the Advertising & Marketing category.

Step 5: Explore topics and search queries . You might find completely unrelated things, especially within the Rising category. It’s just showing what people interested in your chosen category are also searching for.

2. Use Google Trends to determine seasonal patterns

Do you want to find out what kind of seasonality occurs in your industry to better plan advertising activities? Google Trends is a great tool to help with that, here’s how you do it.

Let’s say you sell boots. Common sense tells us that boots would be more popular in autumn and winter seasons and less popular in spring and summer. Let’s use Google Trends to confirm our thesis.

Step 1: Enter your search term . Make sure you don’t choose a topic, because topics and search terms are measured differently.

Step 2: Analyze results and change variables according to your needs.

For example, if we view the popularity of the search term “boots” over the past 12 months, we might want to see, if the same trends have been there for a longer period.

Example 1: Past 12 months.

Example 2: Past 5 years.

As you can (expectedly) see, our assumption was confirmed by the data from Google Trends.

Step 3: Compare results. Let’s see how the search term “boots” compares to something we would deem opposite, for example, keyword “sandals”.

As we can see, the search term “sandals” raises in popularity towards summer and decreases as the winter season approaches.

What we can also see from this comparison is, that even at the lowest point the search term “boots” is more popular than the search term “sandals” at it’s highest. From this, we can deduct, that in the United States, boots are a more popular search term than sandals over the whole year. These statistics could differ if we would focus on a selected region of the United States.

Another example we could use is comparing 2 products: Apple iPhone 8 and Samsung Galaxy S8.

From this, we can deduct, that the launch of the iPhone 8 had sparked more than double the interest in the United States than the launch of Samsung Galaxy S8. As new products have been coming out, the popularity of these products has been in a downward trend.

You can use these same principles to find patterns of seasonality in your industry. This data can be useful when you are making your marketing plan.

3. Use Google Trends for Competitor Research

Google Trends can also be used to identify popular search terms and topics for your competitors. For example, you can view what kind of search terms are popular for your competitor at this moment or which ones were trending a year ago.

Here’s how to do it:

Step 1: Enter the competitor’s name . Let’s use Apple for this example.

Step 2: Set your region and time range .

To view information from the past, navigate to the custom time range .

Next, select the time range you want to view. For this example, we chose 2/2/16 to 3/2/16.

Step 3: Review popular search terms, topics and trends.

We can see which things were popular for our competitor in the past and compare them to the present day. For example, search terms “apple store” and “apple watch” are still among the top searched terms at the beginning of 2020. In contrast, the Apple encryption dispute topic isn’t relevant anymore.

Idea: You can analyze different seasons for your competitor to discover if they have similar year-to-year offers, which you can anticipate and perhaps respond to.

Which leads us to:

4. Use Google Trends to discover patterns

Finding patterns can be extremely useful when planning your advertising and promotional activities. Knowing when the volume for a certain search term tends to increase or decrease can help you to anticipate results from your marketing activities.

Step 1: Enter your keyword . For this example, we have chosen the keyword “marketing”.

Step 2: Select your region .

Step 3: Start analyzing different time ranges .

Daily patterns (View: Custom time range > Past week)

Can you discover any popularity patterns that happen daily?

For this, use the Custom time range > Past week and go through each day. Unfortunately, Google Trends doesn’t allow to go further beyond the past week with hourly data so you will have to perform this analysis over a period to solidify your findings.

Weekly patterns (View: Past 30 days, custom time range)

Scan your keyword for weekly patterns. Is a drop-off occuring often in the search volume? In this example, search volume for the keyword “marketing” descends during weekends.

Monthly patterns (View: Custom time range > 1/1/__ to 1/1/__)

Identifying monthly patterns also goes hand-in-hand with discovering seasonal patterns. With our keyword we can see slight dips during the beginning of summer and larger downward trend at the christmas time.

Yearly patterns (View: 2004 – present)

Looking at the data from 2004 to present, we can see that the volume for the search term “marketing” has descended during the years. We can also identify, that the search volume for this keyword has sudden drops every december (Christmas period).

Google Trends can be a very helpful tool for doing market research. Being able to anticipate certain trends is an invaluable skill in business and marketing.

In this article we learned how to:

Use Google Trends to find popular topics in your industry
Use Google Trends to determine seasonal patterns
Use Google Trends for Competitor Research
Use Google Trends to discover patterns

We hope you found this article useful. If you have any ideas for improvement or just want to share something, please let us know in the comment section

eCommerce Copywriting – 6 Principles You Need To Master

In this article, we will help you increase your odds of converting more visitors into buying customers by using effective e-Commerce copywriting strategies and techniques

Optimizing Your eCommerce Website for Higher Conversion Rate In 2024

Conversion rate optimization(CRO) is a method to increase sales without increasing traffic or ad-spend, simply by making changes to the website. 1 single eCommerce optimization

5 Must Try Product Marketing Videos For Your Ecommerce Business

Many people compare different products online, get recommendations from friends, and read reviews. Most of the consumers, however, watch videos. In fact, users have a

How to Create a Winning eCommerce Marketing Strategy on a Budget

Your first and foremost priority to create a winning e-commerce marketing strategy must be to leverage cost-effective tactics. You will have to be an innovative

Retention Marketing is More Important Than Customer Acquisition, and Here’s Why. [2024]

Every company has a limited budget for marketing and advertising. Marketing experts will often tell you to focus your efforts on acquiring new customers. While