When the ad world searches

by Next Wave Team | Aug 27, 2006 | Advertising, Brand Relevancy, Change the world, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, Future of advertising, Great Ad Agencies, Marketing & the Web, Search and Business, Web strategy

Google is perhaps one of the greatest market research tools ever. Want to find out when someone or something peaks the interest of the market- go to Google labs and look at Google trends. Find out when searches peak for what term.

The two major areas where search engines still aren’t very useful are by location and by time, but Google trends is one of the early tools to be able to show us time and place.

Imagine being able to track buzz by market when launching a new campaign- without having to do expensive research- look at the search for Crispin Porter + Bogusky- and see that winning a major account and winning major awards- create a bump in search.

Google Trends: crispin porter bogusky

Want to see if a new campaign started an increase in interest?

Here is the link to Google trends for the word “Pontiac”- remember they ran a campaign asking customers to google them? Well, it seems labor issues and plant closings are more likely to push search than ads asking people to Google you:

Google Trends: Pontiac

This only works for terms with huge search numbers- trying it on my name results in an error message saying not enough search volume to display graphs- and search Chiat Day- gives a graph- with no data points- but does give location stats.

Tools like this will become increasingly relevant to agency compensation structures- if your campaign doesn’t increase search, or site traffic- it’s not doing its job.

What do you think?