In August 2008, Google launched their new product Google Insights for Search, which was created for advertisers and marketers in order to try and help them understand search habits.
The ‘new and improved’ Google Insights not only allows you to see trends for certain keywords over time, but also help to anticipate demand and find new keywords by highlighting ‘rising’ search terms that are related to the query entered.
However within the last week they have added even more improvements to the already very useful tool.
Firstly they have added different search options, so users can not only see trends and insight into Web Search but also Image, News and Product searches. This could be a very powerful tool for retailers, as they could use the product search to see trends in users buying habits and hopefully predict what people are likely to buy.
The second new feature that has been added is category suggestions for search terms entered, for example when typing in the search terms ‘seo’ and ‘sem’ simultaneously, Insights suggests the following categories:
Internet, Computers & Electronics, Local, Lifestyles, Science, Telecommunications
These suggestions allow the user to see which categories that their search term could be within, in order to help drill down into the correct category and see only the relevant trends, top search terms and rising search terms.
For the search term ‘apple’ for example, users may be searching for the fruit or the electronics company, so depending on which category you wish to look at, the results are going to be skewed by the other category.
However, by drilling down into the correct category this is no longer a problem, as the user will only see the data in the relevant context.
Finally they have added the option to drill down to sub regions of countries and into metros within the United States. This could potentially help companies with geo-targeting, as they can see the areas within the respective sub region or metro that has the highest search results for a particular keyword and therefore aim their product at that audience.
So why not have a look at Google’s Insight for Search and try it out for yourself.
