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Insights into Google Search
Google released another great tool today, Google Insights for Search. Whether you’re an advertising agency, a small business owner, a multinational corporation, or an academic researcher, Insights for Search can help you gauge interest in your relevant search terms. It allows you to compare search volume patterns (and trends) across specific geographic regions, categories (like finance, health, and sports), and time frames. You can read more about it at the Insight for Search help center or get a quick overview here.How does Insights into Search work:
Google Insights for Search analyzes a portion of worldwide Google web searches from all Google domains to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you’ve entered, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. We then show you a graph with the results, indicating interest over time, plotted on a scale from 0 to 100; the totals are indicated next to bars by the search terms.
Read more about how we scale and normalize the data.On the results page, you’ll also see a list of the top searches, top rising searches, and a world heat map graphically displaying the search volume index with regions, subregions, and cities.
Keep in mind that Insights uses data aggregated over millions of users without personally identifiable information, and is powered by computer algorithms. Additionally, Insights only shows results for search terms that receive a significant amount of traffic, and enforces minimum thresholds for inclusion in the tool. For more information about how Google protects privacy, please refer to our privacy policy.
Go try out Google’s Insights for Search for your keywords. Let me know what you think in the comments below.
About the author
Bryan Eisenberg is the co-author of New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling books Call to Action, Waiting For Your Cat to Bark and Always Be Testing. Bryan is available as a professional speaker. You can friend him on Facebook or follow him on Twitter (@TheGrok).
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August 6th, 2008
9:40 am
It’s a great tool, but not very usefull for keywords or sites with a low search rate
August 6th, 2008
9:41 am
At first glance it looks interesting. I am sure people that target by geography zone will find it interesting.
I found the Keyword tool in my Adwords account, is better for what I need. I doubt I will ever use Wordtracker again for researching keywords again. Google just has too much data on searches. No matter how niche your keyword string is, the keyword tool has results. Very important.
Google in their desire to improve Adwords has greatly improved many things related to search.
August 7th, 2008
3:06 pm
This is great stuff and will definitely improve campaign efforts – looking forward to using it!
August 11th, 2008
12:13 pm
Definitely a good tool for trends and search volume comparisons, but it’s pretty useless for anything even resembling a long tail phrase. For that, you still need WordTracker or Trellian (for now).
August 11th, 2008
8:37 pm
As I understand it, this tool presents data measured against the total volume of searches on Google. Since Google’s search traffic pretty much constantly increases (and broadens), you’re measuring against an X axis line that is moving up. So if you have a keyword that is flat, it’s going to look like a downtrend…
It’s an interesting tool though. The trend comparison is a valuable feature.
August 28th, 2008
4:01 pm
I am just starting out at this game of analyzing search traffic, and I was about to enroll in Wordtracker. Can anyone comment on whether I would be better off with AdWords Keyword Tool + Insights, or if I would be better off with Wordtracker? Or another option? I will be doing some niche work, by the way.
August 31st, 2008
4:08 pm
The more information we have to work with, the better off we are in preparing campaigns and following up with them. I’m glad Google continues to provide us with such tools.
September 13th, 2008
10:40 am
Google Insights for Search is a service by Google similar to but a much more advanced extension to Google Trends with more flexibility and functionality.
Check here to know more
http://www.iwebie.com/google-insights-for-search
January 11th, 2009
11:29 am
I think the most useful aspect of it is finding up and coming keywords. Type in they keywords you “think” your site should be optimized for and it’ll show you some others that could be even more popular, or becoming more popular.