Google Trends is a Great Business Tool

My buddy Paul (see previous post)is a huge Google fan. I'm guessing his dream job would be to work for G...or even better have one of his companies acquired by G.

I'm a little more neutral when it comes to big G. I think a bunch of their products are rip offs of something Yahoo! did like 3 years ago (Google Calendar, Google Finance) or are total crap (Google Base, Froogle). I also think that many of their products are extremely innovative and invaluable for a business owner (AdSense, AdWords, Sitemaps, and Analytics come to mind).

I just got finished telling Paul this last night when I saw Google Trends. Google Trends definitely falls into the latter category. It allows you to see search trends for the last two years for any term or combination of terms. The results give you a graphical representation, as well as the top cities, regions, and languages for that search term.

This tool will be extraordinarily valuable for anyone with an online business. You can literally track global demand for your product or products over time. Other tools that I know of don't quite get the job done. Alexa Traffic Rankings is a great tool to size up your site versus your competitor's, but fails to give a snapshot of the market as a whole. Overture's Key Word Selector Tool gives you the number of monthly searches on Yahoo! but fails to give you any data over time.

It has already been beneficial for me. I experienced a peak in sales last November and December and have seen a slow but steady drop since then (thankfully traffic has increased to other parts of my site so all is good). I suspected that this was because of the holidays. But other factors such as changes in my site and competitor's sites make it tough to tell. I probably make up less than 1% of the sports collectibles market, so my data might not be indicative of what the market is doing.

So what happened when I typed in sports collectibles on Google Trends? I saw exactly what I suspected - a spike near the holidays and decline ever since. I'm also concerned about the general downward trend over the past two years, although it doesn't completely surprise me - from what I've read the industry as a whole is shrinking.

Google Trends is a great tool for every entrepreneur. It should be used for your initial market research and continue to be used to track trends in your market after you launch. Thanks for the nice little tool G - hopefully this doesn't mean the next four things you launch will suck.

Oh, and be sure to check out Steve Rubel's blog post entitled 25 Things I Learned on Google Trends. Apparently David Hasselhoff's popularity in Germany is declining. Who would have figured...