Google Trends or how to Talk About What’s Hot

What were people in Mauritius most interested in the past 7 days? And the past 3 months? And since the beginning of this year?

Interesting questions. The instinct would say to look at the newspapers or news websites for the relevant time periods, to check the headlines and VOILA! You have the answer.

But what if you wanted to ask the people in Mauritius themselves what were they thinking about? What interested them? It must be a better option since it’s a direct communication, which excludes all mediators.

And what if you could ask them ANONYMOUSLY? Oh. Wow. That seems like a big fantasy for any marketer/business owner/politician/probably anyone! That would be priceless.

Welcome to Google trends. To start, and to answer some of our first questions:

Most searched phrase terms in Mauritius in the past 90 days

Most searched phrase terms in Mauritius since the beginning of the year

Google Trends

Google trends is a very powerful tool created by Google, which derives its information from Google Search's data and provides insights about users’ searches according to time range, location and even a specific search term.

The main two options when exploring Google Trends are insights on most searched phrases and insights on rising search phrases. In the photo above, the left side shows top searches in Mauritius (as we've already showed in our blog post SEM or why Google's algorithms are smarter than you), and the right side present the searches that rose significantly compared to previous period of time or if you’d like, the hot topics of the last X period.

Analyze Relevant Search Phrases to Your Business

This is how, for example, you can get the information in regards of when are the people in Mauritius most interested in gifts. December is obviously a very popular time for gifts, but not only, check out the peaks in other months like August and most surprising February.

The search term "gift" since 2004 and until today as showed in Google Trends.

Also interesting to see in this graph is how Mauritians search behavior changed along the years.

In the years 2008-2009 you see 3 peaks only around Christmas time whereas you easily see how in 2011 behavior changed and the usage of Google become extremely popular, and never stopped being popular since then. You can read more about it on our latest blog post – why your business must be on Google.

Talk about what’s Hot

Let’s suppose you’re a business owner or a marketer and you’re running a Facebook page or a Google campaign. To understand what will attract people’s attention and to create in-time-and-place relevant post/ad, all you have to do is choose the parameters on Google Trends and there you go:

Rising searches. Talk about what interests people.

You see that in the last 30 days in Mauritius people were interested in "gabbar is back", "Nepal", "Nepal earthquake". Creating a nice ad with the context to the Indian movie will get your audience very interested. Showing your condolences to the people of Nepal in the hard time will not only make you relevant but also will put you in a human, empathic light (rather than just sell, sell, sell).

And MUCH More

Google trends gives you also insights about the hottest trends (From the past few HOURS! However not relevant for Mauritius), about most viewed videos on YouTube, it even predicts search behavior for search term and when will they hit the headlines! And there's much more to it.

Let’s not Summarize or Where You Should be this Coming Thursday, May 21st

Not in the usual, we’d like to NOT summarize this post.

Why? Well, this coming Thursday, the biggest brand event of the year in Mauritius, the Brand Magic Summit is becoming reality.

Two of the speakers of this one of its kind event, will be Senior Googlers and one of the two is the Head of Product Management Core Google Search UI and Google Trends, USA.

We at Quantum Media are very proud to be a part of this unique summit and hope to see you all there and hear in person some of the most interesting people in the world of branding and advertising.

Did you know that…?

When Google launched, in 1998, every day approximately 500,000 searches were performed by users. Today, every second, users are performing more than 2,000,000 searches.