Google Releases More Trend Data

June 11th, 2008

Search marketing strategists will be glad to hear that Google has beefed up its Google Trends tool (slightly) this week.

About Google Trends

This tool is great for getting directional information on keyword popularity that may be important to your campaign. Using Google Trends you can input up to 5 keywords and find out how often they appear in Google Search results (as well as relevant news that may have influenced search spikes).

With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched on Google over time. Google Trends also shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most.

Download Tool Enabled

Users can now download the data into a CSV file and get week by week information with ratings. The ratings can be scaled by either fixed or relative method.

not sure what that means? …neither was I so here is how Google defines them:

The data is scaled based on the average search traffic of the term you’ve entered.

There are two modes of scaling - relative and fixed - and the only difference between them is the time frame that’s used to calculate the average. However, fixed scaling is only available as a .csv export. Please note that the ability to see numbers on the graph and to export this data with either mode of scaling are available only after you’ve signed into your Google Account for Trends.

In relative mode, the data is scaled to the average search traffic for your term (represented as 1.0) during the time period you’ve selected. For example, if you entered the term dogs, the graph you’d see would be scaled to the average of all search traffic for dogs from January 2004 to present. But if you chose a specific time frame - say 2006 - the data would then appear relative to the average of all search traffic for dogs in 2006. Then, let’s suppose that you notice a spike in the graph to 3.5; this spike means that traffic is 3.5 times the average for 2006.

In fixed mode, the data is scaled to the average traffic for your term during a fixed point in time (usually January 2004). In our example, 1.0 would be the average traffic of dogs in January 2004. If you chose 2006 as your time frame, you would be comparing data for dogs in 2006 to its data in January 2004. Since the scale basis (1.0) doesn’t change with time, you can look at different time periods, and relate them to each other. (Note: For keywords without a historical record, it may not be possible to establish a fixed scale).

I was alerted to this enhancement by Carl Bialik, of the The Wall Street Journal, who wrote a great piece about this on his blog. You can also learn more by visiting Google’s Blog.

NOTE: This information is only good for directional purposes since its accuracy is somewhat questionable. Good search strategists (like the folks at NETexponent -wink wink) will use this to develop optimization theories and test to see if the results meet the goal - rather than taking this as law and aggressively pursuing bids accordingly.