The great advantage of Search Engine Marketing is that you're able to get a deeper understanding of what people are interested in, and target ads based on what keywords are searched. Search engines like Google are storing the information users searched, and providing that data to support ad agencies, small businesses, corporations, researchers, etc.
For example, Google's "Insights for Search" allow us to gauge interest in pertinent search terms. This is really interesting, since we are now capable to see search trends and compare against other terms. It can help us determine trends in seasonality, brands vs. brands, choosing ad messages, and opportunities by geo location.
In this post, I'll use an example from major shoe companies and see what this "Insights for Search" tool can do for us. Note that this tool may change and be deleted by Google anytime. So this example and material could be outdated in upcoming months.
In my example, I chose the keywords Nike, Adidas, Puma, and Reebok. These are pretty popular shoe brands out here in USA. After entering these keywords, and selected 2008, the following appears.
Note that the index valued circled in red, is "normalized" values. That means, it allows the underlying characteristics of the data sets to be compared. Obviously, Nike is very popular, and it could mean that Nike has better brand awareness than other shoe brands. However, the term Puma could associate to the animal Puma and some other product names.
Let's narrow the category to Shopping > Apparel > Footwear, and set the country to USA. Very interesting! Now Adidas and Puma has the same interest level of 25.
This is very interesting because the spike in August for Puma, tells me that they must have done something around Beijing Olympics to capture higher awareness and interest amongst the people in USA. My personal hypothesis is, Usain Bolt (Jamaica's sprinter) was wearing Puma shoes, which caused a viral effect on consumers to search online. Well, that's for you to research and confirm, and hopefully you can prove me right.
I really like the "Growth relative to category" tab next to "Interest level" tab. It shows you how each terms or brands are doing relevant to its category. I stretched the timeline to 2004 to present, and noticed something crazy going on with Reebok in 2005. What happened there, and why is it trending downwards after that.
Although Adidas seems pretty stable within its category, I've noticed the growth level was high in Germany. Check it out (below)! Also it is interesting to see it peeking at 2006 summer. If you follow soccer, you'll immediately know that Germany hosted the World Cup in June 2006. I also find this chart interesting, because Nike is growing, and has the highest growth rate in 2008. Good job Nike.
I can go on and on breaking it down by regions, and search terms including rising terms. However, I'll stop here, I hope you get the point. This tool is pretty powerful to trend the brand awareness and interest. I hope this will help you get a better understanding of search and how it can help you research the market. To those marketers for Nike, Reebok, Adidas, and Puma, I hope this helped you, too. Enjoy analyzing!!
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