These free Google tools can provide valuable insights for business planning and marketing strategies. Customer Barometer allows comparisons of customer purchase decisions across product categories and brands. Trends identifies popular and seasonal search terms that can predict future interest. Google Correlate finds related search terms that can expand target audiences. Customer journeys reveal the decision-making process by industry to optimize marketing touchpoints. NGrams provides historic trends over extended time periods. These tools offer contextual understanding to inform content and advertising strategies.
2. 1. Customer Barometer
- This tool allows you to search through the piles of data collected through google’s surveys
- HOW CAN YOU USE IT?
- You can compare how people make purchase decisions for different product categories.
3. - Here, we can see that most people consider only a single brand before they make a clothing and footwear
purchase decision.
- A niche of consumers, however, put in a lot of research (they look at 5 or more brands)
4. - You can also compare product categories.
- One major difference between Laptop purchases and Footwear/clothing purchases is that brand matters more
often for laptops than they do for clothing and footwear.
5. 2. Trends
- This tool allows you to map the popularity of different search terms over time.
- That means you can see what is becomes popular.
- HOW CAN YOU USE IT?
- You can use trends to predict what people will be soon searching for, or if a trend has
already died.
- You can also use it to detect seasonality.
6. - You can find which topics are gaining in popularity and which are dropping in popularity.
- In this example, you’d get more interest writing an article about avocado oil.
7. - You can also look for seasonal patterns.
- Worldwide, there’s a sharp increase in interest in avocado oil in January, so publish your article then.
8. - In the END of the year in the United States, there is a small dip in searches for ‘depression’.
- There’s a bigger dip at the MIDDLE of each year.
End of year
9. - In Australia, the pattern is reversed.
- The biggest dips are at the end of the year. Maybe depression is related to winter.
Middle of year
10. 3. Google Correlate
- This tool allows you to see which terms have similar changes in search volume as each
other.
- HOW CAN YOU USE IT?
- You can find alternate pathways to access certain target audiences.
11. - The term ‘moon tattoo’ has had peaks in search volume at the same time ‘jeep’ has.
- You might decide to target Jeep ads to people searching for moon tattoos, where the ad
bidding will be cheaper.
12. - Alternatively, you can use this to find popular misspellings. Every time there is a spike in
‘Trump’ searches, there is a spike in ‘Trimp’ searches.
- If you were working for the democratic campaign, you could target people interested in
Trump cheaply by advertising when people search ‘Trimp’ accidentally.
13. 4. Customer journeys
- This tool allows you to see how customers make decisions, depending on which industry
you’re in.
- Google tracs every customer journey by industry to give you this data.
- HOW CAN YOU USE IT?
- Understanding user behaviour during the decision making process helps you understand
how to be most effective at influencing behaviour.
14. - For a medium sized business in Arts & Entertainment, display ads raise awareness.
- Emails and brand paid search lead to a buy after awareness exists.
Display ad
Email
Brand paid search
15. - For a medium sized business in industry, paid or organic search capture first engagement.
- Customers then return directly to your website or via email.
Organic
search
Direct to
website
16. - We can also see that emails are at the middle of the journey for this demo 51% of the time, but we
know they’re important for getting the customer over the line.
- So these emails should focus on opening up lines to communication, linking to quotes/purchase pages
& being product oriented.
17. 5. NGrams
- This tool scans through Google’s entire digitized archive of books and returns frequencies
of certain phrases.
- HOW CAN YOU USE IT?
- Ngrams gives you insight into historic trends over more extended periods of time.
18. - This graph shows there’s been a decline in the term ‘leisure’ but a rise in ‘politics’
- Are we too stressed out about the political scene to relax?
19. - If you were deciding which famous thinker to write about (say you’re starting a blog
aimed at new uni students), you can check who other people have been writing about.
- But you can get more relevant data….
21. - So even though more people are writing about Foucault, not many people are interested.
- And even though people are writing about Chomsky the least, that’s who most people are
searching for.
Chomsky
Freud
Foucault
GOOGLE TRENDS
NGRAMS
22. - That’s not all, you can also find out why Noam Chomsky is suddenly interesting people
AND which terms they’re using to research him.
- This can be arranged by ‘rising’ or ‘top’.
- A little more research shows that the film Captain Fantastic has plotline about Chomsky,
and that Chomsky made some interesting predictions about Trump.
- All this can help you decide what you’re article should be written about.
