New Google Tool - Insights for Search
I was popping by Google’s Inside Adwords Blog today and read a post about a new tool called “Insights for Search.” I tested it out and was impressed at what I saw so here is a review and some notes on how to utilize Insights for Search
The idea of this tool is to give the end user a glimpse into some search history, compare peaks and valley’s to news articles (much the same way Google Trends did) but also give a user the ability to understand search behaviour. It has some really powerful features, especially for an Internet Marketing agency like ours
Some very cool features include a “heat map” of the world or any geographic region you want to target and the corresponding rising search terms for a particular keyword you are examining. Additionally, you can compare up to 5 search terms and see how a users search habits differ across geographic areas. For example, if you are in the market for Laisk surgery - the west coast of the U.S. might be more inclined to use the search phrase “lasik eye surgery” while the east coast might use the phrase “laser eye surgery” more often. As an advertiser, it is important to segment these keywords and phrases depending on the target market you are focused on.
Furthermore, you can filter your queries by various categories. One example might be “java” which will have a different meaning depending on if you are looking for a programming language or a hot cup of coffee. Using the category drop down will allow you to segment the data accordingly.
You can also look at search trends by a particular date range. The default is set to 2004 - present but opening the drop down allows you to select some set ranges as well as a custom range.
Comparing your data by “location” and “time ranges” is also an option which can present some very powerful data but only for the top searches for the day, not custom keywords you select.
The tool also has a handy export feature to excel.
I was puzzled by the numbers that appear in the graph and upon further investigation found that these aren’t actual search numbers but rather “normalized” numbers that Google is displaying. You can read more about this here.
When I met Google’s cofounder Sergey Brin at a search engine marketing conference in 1998, he wasn’t eager to share Google’s search engine secrets. He was quiet, but confident he had the secret to big success though. He had the knowledge and fortunately the support to make his dream come true. And the secret was the secret sauce - Google’s mix of ranking factors they used to rank web pages, what’s known as an indexing algorithm. Google was an underdog then, yet a rising star. They had a clean, useful product which served up an interesting mix of search results that other search engines did not.