Getting Trendy With Google Trends

Tuesday, June 5th, 2007
by George Appiah

If you happen to belong to the rare breed of Ghanaian webmasters and website owners who care about web analytics, you will find Google Trends a handy tool for analyzing how often your website’s main theme (or any topic, for that matter) is searched for over time.

I stumbled upon this cool tool today as I was going through Google Zeigteist, which, I also learnt, has been replaced with Hot Trends

You can enter up to five topics and Google Trends will analyze a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time.

These results are displayed in two simple graphs. The search volume graph at the top shows the number of times the keyword was searched for. The second, just beneath the search-volume graph, is the news-reference-volume graph. This shows the number of times your topic appeared in Google News stories.

In addition to the search and news volume graphs, Google Trends also displays the top cities, regions, and languages for the first term you entered.

To see Google Trends in action for myself, I pitched Ghana against Uganda, sort of Using SBI’s Brainstormer, I knew in advance that there are a lot more searches containing the term “Ghana” than “Uganda”. And Google Trends confirmed this in the graph below for the year 2006.

Google Trends also shows a spike in the search volume for Ghana in July. This can be attributed to Ghana’s impressive performance in the Soccer World Cup event held in Germany which took place around this time. Indeed, the top article during this spike is about Ghana’s 2-1 win over the United States of America.