Tom H. C. Anderson - More Than Market Research

In the current issue of ESOMAR Research World magazine Andrew Jeavons writes about “The digital canary”. Andrew proposes using Google Trends as a way to judge the success of companies like Microsoft and Yahoo, and then looks at specific themes or verbatim concepts such as marketing research:

“Since mid-2003, there has been a steady decline in the use of the search term ‘market research’…it may mean that there is a shift in what is seen as market research and the relevance of the term market research”.

I took a quick look, but rather than comparing the term ‘market research’ to ‘Microsoft’ and ‘Yahoo’ I looked at something more closely linked to our industry, the term ‘Advertising’ (see chart below).

As you can see according to the chart it appears that ‘Advertising’ too has been decreasing in relevance at an alarming rate since 2003. Yet Advertising, and specifically online advertising, has been increasing in importance over the past few years.

I admit to sometimes using Google Trends as a quick and dirty reference on how a trend is doing or how a clients brand is doing. In fact, we have even been beta testing a tool which reads Google trends charts to give us numbers which can then be used in our analysis (correlation analysis etc.).

However, it is extremely important to realize that these are relative numbers not tied to any specific benchmark (at least none that has been published by Google). We have no way of knowing the accuracy or error associated with these numbers. In fact Google even allows you to go back in time to before Google was created, this can show you some really weird data. I like the idea of using Google Trends as a metric, but until Google releases a little more information about this tool I would advise being very careful of how to interpret these charts.

Tom