We figured it would be great to highlight some Australian-specific insights we've found using Insights for Search. Hopefully they'll stimulate your own discovery of other interesting online trends in Australia!
As an example, if you perform a basic enquiry, leaving all the default settings and simply type [
didgeridoo], this will show you search information from across the world, from 2004 to today. As you might expect, there is a lot of interest in didgeridoos here in Australia. But what you might not expect is the other countries with a large relative interest in didgeridoos, like Austria. If you were in the business of making fine, handcrafted didgeridoos here in Australia, you could build your international business by focusing your online advertising within the most relevant international markets: Austria, Switzerland and the Czech Republic.
It's also possible to compare search terms by location, time range and category. With the Categories filter, you can hone in on results based on different categories. For example, you can enter the search query [the vines] and isolate results to the music category, to see interest in the rock band
The Vines, rather than the WA resort. If you throw in a few more bands for
comparative purposes, it's interesting to see how popularity is changing over time, and that great bands have peaks and troughs (often around album sales or tours)! [The Vines] peaked in early 2004, [
Wolfmother] peaked in 2005/2006, but [
Crowded House] continues to be consistently popular. It's also interesting to note which in which Australian regions [The Vines] are searched - as a proportion of total searches, they're most popular in Perth.
Using the "Categories" filter, you can also see the most popular searches for an entire category, such as [
basketball], where you can notice the huge spike in interest around the Beijing Olympic Games.
A further use of Insights for Search is to see popular searches and rising queries, from here and abroad. An
analysis, for example, of Australian vacation destinations that Germans are searching for, shows that Ayers Rock/Uluru and the Great Barrier Reef are popular destinations, with the Whitsundays and Tasmania rapidly increasing in popularity in the past 18 months.
Businesses can further use Insights for Search by viewing search trends for over time. The seasonality of searches can be used to target advertising campaigns around events like Fathers Day or Christmas. Look at the spike in searches for [
car stereos] in the lead up to Christmas.
We hope you'll find Google Insights for Search to be an extremely valuable tool. Given the various methods of comparison, the ability to filter by category and visualise heat maps by region, hopefully you'll discover new and engaging information about your products, markets, and advertising!
Posted by Justin Baird, Senior Product Specialist
