By Charlie Cummins – bbmm.ie
The Google Breakfast Briefing today, was the 10th (and last) of the current 2015 series. Having looked at various elements of the overall Google service offering over the past 10 months, today wrapped it up with a look at Google Tools and Insights.
Three distinct elements were covered in today’s presentation
1.Google Trends
2. Consumer Barometer
3. Think With Google.
These are all free to use tools and provide a wealth of information which will help maximise returns from internet searches.
1. Google Trends:
This tool lets users track how searches have been trending over time for a given topic, industry category or even company. The database contains trends covering any period from 2004 up to the present. And, crucially, it contains data specifically related to the Irish market.
Using the tool, it is possible to look at say, the rising trend in searches for “Healthy Recipes” and explore if this is a recent trend, and what related topics are also trending with it. It can also be used to set up alerts for topics of interest, to be emailed automatically to you on a daily or weekly basis.
The link to Google trends is https://www.google.com.gi/trends/
2. Consumer Barometer:
Google’s global interactive tool, the Consumer Barometer, has been updated with 2015 data and now covers more than 45 countries and ten product categories. This resource can be found at https://www.consumerbarometer.com
It provides a wide range of data on how people interact with the internet – the data date can be queried by a wide variety of variables such as how people search locally, how many internet connected devices they own, what is their multi-screen activity and so . As with Google Trends, the data is available for the Irish market, as well as for other markets across the world.
From a business owner’s point of view, a good use of using the Consumer Barometer would be to use it as a tool to check that the content of your website is an accurate reflection of what people are searching for in your product/service category.
3. Think With Google:
This was final tool looked at today, which provide a wealth of ready-made data sets under three categories as follows:
Topics: providing detailed information on 23 different categories including, as examples, Micro Moments, Mobile, Retail and Consumer Trends
Creative: insights into the creative process on the web such as case studies, behind the scenes, discussions and so on
Tools: has a number of planning tools (including links back to Google Trends and Consumer Barometer
the link to Think with Google is https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com
Time spend exploring these three tools will repay itself, especially if used to focus in on your own particular area of business interest. The amount of data available – at no charge – is amazing and is a treasure trove of useful marketing data.
