Finding the Most Popular Regions for Search Categories
August 5th, 2008 at 11:35 am | by Michael Giuffrida |Google Trends is great for tracking (and comparing) individual keywords. But what if you want to see results for a broader category, or a general idea, rather than for individual products or for specific instances of the idea?
For example, say you have a product that you really want to market to people who enjoy social networking. To find out what keywords to use and advertise on, you’ll do a Google Trends search for facebook for, let’s say, last month, June 2008. The results will rank the top regions in the following order:
Region facebook (exported data)
1. Colombia 1.00
2. Croatia 0.98
3. South Africa 0.84
4. Turkey 0.83
5. United Kingdom 0.72
6. Canada 0.65
7. Venezuela 0.585
8. Chile 0.565
9. Serbia and Montenegro 0.555
10. Greece 0.475
But you’ll want to include people who search for all different social networking sites. So you’ll also look at the MySpace search’s list of cities:
Region myspace
1. United States 1.00
2. Australia 0.80
3. United Kingdom 0.435
4. Mexico 0.375
5. Italy 0.23
6. France 0.225
7. Canada 0.155
8. Germany 0.15
9. Spain 0.125
Okay, so do you target Colombia and Croatia, or the US and Australia, or all four? Recall that, to find the list of popular regions, Google first pulls the regions with highest search volume on the keyword and then sorts them by the percent of searches using that keyword, out of all searches from that region. So if Colombia is at the top of the Trends chart, that means that a lot of people searched for facebook from Columbia. But it also means that a lot more of the searches from Columbia are for facebook than they are in regions like the UK and Canada, even though those regions probably have more total searches for facebook.
What does this mean? Let’s assume that about the same percentage of Colombian surfers and UK surfers use Google. Then a higher percent of Colombian surfers Google facebook than do UK surfers. If you have to pay per ad impression, you’ll want your ads on Colombian pages, because for the same number of impressions, your ad will be shown to more people who are searching for facebook and, we assume for the purposes of this post, are interested in social networking. In other words, the percentage of Google searches for facebook out of all Google searches is greater in Colombia than it is in the UK.
But we still have to deal with the facebook/myspace issue. Well, Google Trends supports an OR operator, the pipe |, which we can use to get results for searches that include the keyword facebook or the keyword myspace. We can add as many keywords as we like, so let’s look at the Regions chart for myspace | facebook | linkedin | bebo | flickr | friendster, June 2008.
Region myspace | facebook | linkedin…
1. Ireland 1.00
2. United Kingdom 0.52
3. Croatia 0.45
4. Malaysia 0.45
5. Colombia 0.44
6. Philippines 0.37
7. South Africa 0.36
8. Turkey 0.35
9. Australia 0.33
10. Indonesia 0.33
Ireland! This is because of the inclusion of bebo (bebo.com) which replaced Google as Ireland’s most trafficked site last year (right now it’s the 5th), so bebo combined with the rest of the keywords yields almost twice the percentage that the other regions do.
If you look at the Trends result for all the keywords above except bebo, you get fairly similar rankings, except Ireland’s nowhere to be found and Canada pops up. Generally, as Google says, the order of regions that are very closely ranked can’t be relied upon too much, due to sampling error. So these ten regions, or maybe the top half, are good places to start advertising if you’re targeting social networkers.
Tags: advertising, google, google trends, making comparisons, regions, search volume