Google Inc., on Tuesday has taken the wraps off of its popular Google Trends and rolled out a new tool called Google Insights for Search, which it said is geared towards helping brand marketers and advertising users to better analyze Internet search patterns.
Insights for Search also extend its earlier offering with added capabilities, such as a “heat map” for graphically displaying search volumes and other data.
Insights for Search, is a free tool that checks Google’s database of search results to unearth information advertisers drool. Google said the product was designed with marketers in mind.
“It provides more flexibility and functionality for advertisers and marketers to understand search behavior, and adds some cool new features like a world heat map to graphically display search volume and regional interest,” Elan Dekel and Niv Efron wrote on the Google blog.
Insights for Search is designed to be used by advertisers, small business owners, academics and others, Google said, noting that it provides added “flexibility and functionality for advertisers and marketers to understand search behavior.”
For example, Google — which today introduced an upgraded version of its enterprise-oriented Google Search Appliance — said in a help document that Insights for Search could be used by a car maker to determine what marketing messages work best based on search patterns. When the terms “fuel efficiency,” “safety” or “engine performance” are entered into the Insights software, it shows clearly that most searchers are interested in automotive safety, the company said in the document.
Aaron Wall, a search engine optimization consultant who writes a blog called “SEO Book,” said in a post that Insights for Search should be useful for analyzing the relationships between generic search concepts and more specific ones, as well as measuring how news coverage and business developments change the relative importance of different keywords.
Marketing and public relations workers will be able to use the graphs that can be created with Insights for Search “to say, ‘Hey, our brand is catching up with the market leader,’” Wall wrote. Rather than brand lift and PR lift being an abstract concept, we can compare brands in real time and see which markets resonate with our brands and marketing.”
And when examination of search patterns shows that marketing strategies are working well, companies can consider trying to boost their early successes with offline advertising or live events in the most receptive markets, he said.
Companies are using Web analytics more and more, and Insights for Search will likely tap into the growing trend, Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of Nucleus Research, said in a statement.
“I think what we are seeing is that if companies are spending on AdWords, they want to correlate the returns — not just by guessing, but with better data,” Wettemann explained. “This eliminates some of the guesswork and enables people to test out their marketing hypotheses to see where the results are coming from.”
Indeed, “the idea is for Google to provide more value to its ad customers, no doubt — not only so they can better tune their ads, but also so they can increasingly come to Google as the trusted source for the information they need,” Rob Enderle, president and principal analyst at the Enderle Group, said in a statement.
“This is Google’s space,” he added, “and it has so much of a lead in this space that a competitor would not just have to do better — it would have to do a lot better to displace them.”