Google Trends
Here's a tool that all marketers and more importantly search engine marketers like myself should definitely have a look - Google Trends, a new analysis tool recently released by Google. (Don't get too obsess with it!)
So what is this new baby by Google? Here is Google's explanation:
With Google Trends, you can compare the world's interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they've been searched for on Google over time. Google Trends also displays how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and which geographic regions have searched for them most often.
Here are some things that we marketers can learn from Google Trend.
- Many have said that advertising is dead and public relations is the way for more effective marketing. However, we can still see that advertising is still the most popular marketing medium as compared to Public Relations. [See Trend]
- So which is more important? Brand, sales or loyalty? Answer: sales is still the most important. Of course, where is the brand & loyalty with sales? [See Trend]
- Something of interest here for search engine marketers. While Google has a bigger market share than Yahoo. The trend shows here that Yahoo is still the more popular search term as compared to Google. [See Trend]
- Which is more popular? Email marketing, direct marketing or search engine marketing? Direct marketing is still the more popular one. [See Trend]
- Which market research firm is more popular? ACNielsen, Forrester or Roy Morgan? Looks like Forrester is the more popular in most countries. [See Trend]
- Asians are more interested in marketing science than the others. [See Trend]
- There is an increment on the appointments of chief marketing officer and there are more chief marketing officers in India than in US. [See Trend]
- Finally, God is still bigger than us marketers :> [See Trend]
2 comments:
While Google Trends provides an interesting indicator, your conclusions are spurious at best.
There are several logical fallacies you are suffering from including:
- regression fallacy; ascribing cause where none exists
- fallacy of false premise; the premise is not correct, therefore the conclusion is in error
- fallacy of hasty generalization; arriving at a broad conclusion based on insufficient data
- appeal to the majority; if many believe it, it must be so
In essence, the frequency of search for certain terms doesn't prove anything on its own. For example, the fact that advertising is searched for more often than PR doesn't mean it is more effective. And, if we accept the premise that it is more popular, an alternative explanation could be that advertising is more visible, therefore more easy to sell to management.
Or, it may be true that sales is more important, but that is because it represents revenue, which is a company's lifeblood. But the question for a marketer is "What drives sales?". From the marketer's perspective, sales is a result that measures success of other programs which are critical and important to get to the sale. In otherwords, we haven't answered the question, "Which comes first - the brand or the sale?"
In fact, every one of your conclusions suffers from these attribution or presumption errors. You have identified things to investigate and test, not data to live by.
You do marketers a disservice by making all of us appear to lack understanding of basic reasoning and mathematical principles. (Of course, anyone reaching that conclusion is employing another logical fallacy, but I don't wish to enable them).
In your link, sales is indeed ahead of "public relation" but it would be more interesting to see sales versus "public relations" (still trends higher, but not as misleading).
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