THE HIDDENGOOGLE

5 powerful free Google tools you don’t know about

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.

- 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)

- 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.

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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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

- 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

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.

- 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.

- 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.

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.

- 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

- 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 towebsite

- 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.

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.

- 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?

- 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….

- …By combining it with Google Trends.

- 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

- 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.