Comparing brand strength with Google Trends

I want to talk today about Google Trends and its ability to highlight brand strength.

I was at a conference last week for the Self-Storage Association of Australasia. They’re a great bunch of people, and we got to talking about how we use Google Trends, especially for looking at the strength of brands and checking your brand compared to others.

One great way to check the strength of your brand is to do a search on Google Trends and put it up against similar businesses or companies in the same niche. I put our old favourite Skinnymixers up against celebrity chef Nigella Lawson and MasterChef star George Calombaris. Looking at the trends, we can see that Skinnymixers is more popular, or at least has been searched for more often, than the other two brands.

I use Google Trends all the time to see what people are talking about and what’s going on. It was really interesting last week because Australia, as usual, was getting another Prime Minister, and I decided to take a look at the trends. 

One politician was getting much higher search results than the other, and that usually means that’s who’s going to win the election. But then I added AFL to the mix, because it’s football finals here in Australia, and it blew both candidates out of the water. More of us follow football than politics, apparently, and I think that’s a generally healthy attitude.

That’s how I use Google Trends. You have to keep in mind that all these numbers are relative to each other. If you want to start getting some hard numbers about your brand, try using one basic phrase as a control to get some perspective on the numbers you’ll be seeing.