More Ways to Use Google to Boost Your Marketing Potential

Have you ever checked out Google’s Insights for Search? Basically it’s a set of tools launched last summer that let you look at trends in search to help you apply them to your own marketing campaigns. “See what the world is search for,” as the product’s slogan goes.

Features as noted by Ruth Brennan at Google’s Conversion Room blog include:

–  A world Geo Heat Map to show volume of traffic from different locations

–  Ability to search trends by location, time frame or category

– News Headlines which may have impacted search volume for a specific time

– Top searches – highest searched terms by category or by region
 
– Rising Searches – fastest growing trends by category or region

Examples of good times to use Insights for Search that Google suggests are:

– When Choosing Advertising Messages
– When Examining Seasonality
– When Creating Brand Associations
– When Entering New Markets

“Insights can help you determine which messages resonate best,” Google explains. “For example, an automobile manufacturer may be unsure of whether it should highlight fuel efficiency, safety, or engine performance to market a new car model.”

With regards to seasonality, you can select a range of dates and compare keyword performance over that time period for several different years. You can then refine that of course until you get the exact time frame most likely to give you the best results.

You can use Insights for Search to determine what competing brands are doing and use that information to make your own campaign stand out. “Carefully examining the resulting top related searches and the rising searches can help the agency better understand competitors’ offers, thereby creating a campaign to differentiate their client’s brand,” Google says.

When looking to break into a new market, you may find it useful to use Insights for Search’s geographical data. You can look up keywords and compare the data among multiple countries and find where the most interest is.

Here is a short video about the tool:

There is a great deal of useful information to be gained from a tool like this. Combine what you get from that with testing results from a tool like Google’s Web optimizer, and you’re likely to have a pretty good leg up on much of your competition.

If you have had positive experiences (or negative ones for that matter) with Google’s Insights for Search or other similar tools, please feel free to share them with Murdok readers.