Digital Marketing Research Tools: Google Insights For Search

On Tuesday of this week, Google launched a new tool with a wide range of applications for marketers and marketing researchers, Google Insights for Search.

Google Insights allows users to analyze and compare different search terms by showing patterns in search volume over time, group top related search terms, and show which of those related terms are rising or falling in popularity.  It also allows you to slice and dice the data by different date ranges and geographical locations.

Below is a quick chart I did analyzing the search interest of a couple top social networking sites by comparing the search volumes associated with their names over the past year and a half (click for larger image).

Google Insights for Search

In a very intuitive and and clean manner, the tool shows how MySpace’s search popularity has plateaued, while Facebook has rapidly overtaken it in the past several months.  It also shows the rapid rise of interest in the fast growing site, Hi5.

This tool is very granular, allowing users to drill down to very specific localities (e.g., Madison, WI) or time frames (e.g., last week).  Which means it has strong utility for local and seasonal search analyses.

You can even filter results by category, so you can analyze results for “apple” the fruit, rather than the company Apple, which dominates the search traffic for that word.

Marketers in particular can use Google Insights to analyze the popularity over time of different trends, topics, products, or even marketing campaigns.

Google Insights is clearly a tool that can mine Google’s massive “database of intentions” for a vast range of different insights and applications.

And, by the way, it’s free.