On the latest post from web analytics guru, Avinash Kaushik, he discusses into a lot of detail the use of Google Trends as a free and acceptable competitive intelligence tool.
So what is so hot about it?
According to Google: “With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched on Google over time. Google Trends also shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most“.
Interesting! Not only that but “When Google Trends detects a spike in the volume of news stories for a particular search term, it labels the graph and displays the headline of an automatically selected Google News story written near the time of that spike.” In simpler words, we can find the a plausible explanation for that spike in the search term.
As part of my work, I have to follow closely the activities of Flickr.com. After reading Avinash’s entry I rushed into doing some web analytis of Flickr.com using Google Trends.
- The graph above indicates the number of daily unique visits at www.flickr.com. Flickr’s daily unique visits has gone up and down over time but has an upward trend wordwide.
- Worldwide visitors who visited this site also visited:
- flickr.net (no surprise there)
- bighugelabs.com (tools/widgets/applications to use in Flickr)
- divinecaroline.com (e-zine for women, so I can have the hypothesis that photo sharing websites should focus on women!)
- cracked.com (a place to kill time)
- photobasement.com (photo-blog)
- failblog.org (photo-blog)
- consumerist.com (name says it all, independent consumer report site, don’t really understand the connection here)
- digital-photography-school.com (blog that teachers better photography techniques)
- Flickr is searched mainly in the USA. Second to the USA, India is ahead of all other countries in looking/visiting Flickr.
- Inside of USA, California is by far the most active subregion with Flickr.
- According to this data, consumerist.com and divinecaroline.com are the top other sites visited by Flickr visitors. #3 is cracked.com.
- Search Volume Index of term, photo sharing, using Google Trends
- The second graph above shows the search volume index for photo sharing. The letters indicate important news related to that point in time. It is interesting that these stories are related to a company/organization promoting a better photo-sharing product/service (e.g. Flickr, Avanquest, lenzus.com, Ubicom.
Conclusions:
- Photo sharing is only exciting if it is better.
- Tools&widgets communities support the further development of a photo sharing community.
- Women spend time looking at pictures online. Let’s focus on them! The wedding photography idea is really good.
- There is a connection between consumerist.com and flickr.com. No idea what it is, but it might worth the while to check it out.
- People that spend time looking at pictures online also spend time looking at photo-blogs for quick laughs.
The term conclusions seems a bit overwhelming, I would prefer to name them hypothesis that I would like to further investigate. However, the main point of this exercise is to demonstrate that Google Trends is a free competitive intelligence tool that provides good ideas to check your web analytics processes.
What do you think? : )
Damian,
An excellent set of analysis! I think the hypothesis you have formed based on the available data are quite sound.
In real life if perhaps you might be working at Flickr : ) then you would have access to the internal data would give you great context to the Google Trends data and you would truly be on your way to making some interesting strategic decisions.
-Avinash.
Hello Avinash,
Thank you for reading my post and I really appreciate your input. If I was able to track Flickr.com using Google Analytics, that would be really great! The kind of web metrics that Google Analytics offers could allow me to validate (to a certain degree) my set of conclusions.
Google Trends sounds like a great opportunity for people interested in determining the best set of search words to use in services such as AdWords. Thank you for the tip!
Cheers,
Damian
Thank you for the tip
Wonder where we can get analytics of our flickr accounts for measuring growth / interest on our accounts?
Gem, you can get stats from your Flick accounts by upgrading your Flickr account to Pro. That’s the only way to get full stats of your Flickr account. You will see a trend of how many daily views your photos get, how people are finding your photos, among other cool things. I would only recommend going pro if your Flickr account gets heavy traffic (e.g. 300+ daily views), otherwise it is not that useful.