Last week Google announced the release of a new layer to Google Trends. Google Trends for Websites is a tool that lets you see how popular your favourite websites are.
Using Google trends you can compare how popular different search terms or different websites have been over a given period. For example, here is a comparison of Google Maps and Virtual Earth.
As you can see Google Trends produces a very useful graph for each of your searches. It also produces a list of the top ten cities where search for the trend has originated from. But strangely, for Google, they haven't mapped that geographical data.
So step forward Mibazaar and their new Google Trends Map.
Mibazaar's Google Trends Map shows you a graph of the search results over time and lists the top ten cities where search has originated from but it also includes a handy Google Map so you can visualise where search is emanating from.
Which is of course hugely addictive because you can find the answer to many of your burning questions. For example, The citizens of Phoenix, AZ however are more interested in searching for 'eight legged freaks' and in Southfield, MI they seem most concerned about finding 'cheap gas'.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Google Trends Map
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Traffic Stats in Google Trends
Google Trends no longer displays only information about searches, now you can use it to compare the daily unique visitors for two or more sites. To see the actual numbers, you need to log in using a Google account.
It's interesting to find the sources that are used by Google to estimate the traffic of a web site. According to the help page, "Trends for Websites combines information from a variety of sources, such as aggregated Google search data, aggregated opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in consumer panel data, and other third-party market research. (...) Additionally, Google Trends for Websites only shows results for sites that receive a significant amount of traffic, and enforces minimum thresholds for inclusion in the tool."
For example, Google Trends estimates that the number of daily visitors for Facebook.com is 30 million, 3 times bigger than one year ago. You can also find the countries where a site is popular, related sites and searches.
One interesting tidbit: you can't see traffic data for most Google sites (for example: google.com, although there are some exceptions). Google explains that you may not find traffic data for web sites with low traffic, web sites that don't respect Google's guidelines or aren't indexed by Google.
Google's blog for webmasters warns that the data may not be very accurate. "Keep in mind that Trends for Websites is a Google Labs product and that we are experimenting with ways to improve the quality of the data. Because data is estimated and aggregated over a variety of sources, it may not match the other data sources you rely on for web traffic information."
There are other services that show web traffic stats: Compete, Quantcast (for US traffic), Alexa, but it's difficult to compare Google's data with the information provided by those services because they use different measures: daily uniques vs monthly uniques, actual numbers vs reach, worldwide visitors vs US visitors.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Google Trends to a Spreadsheet
One of our favorite Google products you forgot all about—Google Trends—now offers comparison data as a CSV spreadsheet-friendly file. You've got to be signed into your Google Account to see the "Export this page as a CSV file" link. Here's the Google Trends comparison of searches for "GTD" versus "Lifehacker".
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Google Trends with a new flavor
Let's walk through an example of how these nifty new features come into play. With the hot summer months rapidly approaching in many parts of the world, many of us turn to the frosty treat of ice cream to cool off. But have you ever wondered which flavor people search for more frequently: vanilla or chocolate?
First, let's take a look at the searches for vanilla ice cream and chocolate ice cream separately. Here's what vanilla looks like on its own:
You'll notice a number at the top of the graph as well as on the y-axis of the graph itself. These numbers don't refer to exact search-volume figures. Instead, in the same way that a map might “scale” to a certain size, Google Trends scales the first term you've entered so that its average search volume is 1.00 in the chosen time period. So in the example above, 1.00 is the average search volume of vanilla ice cream from 2004 to present. We can then see a spike in mid-2006 which crosses the 3.00 line, indicating that search traffic is approximately 3 times the average for all years. Read more about how we scale the data.
Here's what chocolate looks like on its own:
Let's look at how vanilla compares with chocolate. Keep in mind that when you compare multiple terms, they'll all be scaled relative to the first term you've entered.
Google Trends is not only a fun tool; it also offers some practical uses as well. Suppose you own an ice cream shop and don't know which flavors to serve, or suppose you're responsible for stocking supermarkets across the country; Trends can help you explore the popularity and seasonality of your products. To conduct your own, more detailed analyses, you can now easily export Trends data to a .csv file (a common format to import/export data), which can be opened in most spreadsheet applications. When you use the export function, you'll also have the choice of using either relative scaling (what we've shown here) or fixed scaling (scaled to a specific time range).
We hope you enjoy this new flavor of Google Trends. And of course, we want to know: which flavor of ice cream do you like best?
Posts
