Determine Seasonal Search Volumes
April 2, 2010 | Marketing, PPC, Resources by Paul Baumgarthuber |
Anyone that has ever created a PPC campaign knows that Google’s keyword tool is a God sent. It can tell you the search volumes for the previous month, average search volume over the previous year, estimated CPC’s and how much advertising competition there is for specific keywords. One limitation that presents itself with the system is when trying to figuring out seasonal keyword search volumes. This limitation can be very frustrating and costly when it comes to creating campaigns for keyword themes like, “spring training tickets”, “Christmas cards”, or “Valentines roses”. Let’s use “Christmas cards” as an example and take a look at the search volumes for it.
When looking at the search volume for “Christmas cards” we only have access to the global average for the previous year and the estimated US search volume for the previous month in the Google Keyword Tool. So would we go about figuring out what the search volume would be in December? The solution to this problem is to use the keyword tool in conjunction with Google Trends.
What Google Trends Will Tell You
All of Google’s tools are based off of the same data set which means that if you know how to manipulate the different tools you can extract data that is not normally available. What Google Trends shows us is how the search volume for a specific keyword varies over a defined period of time. In the situation of seasonal keywords we can set Google Trends to only look at the previous years search volumes and take the information provided to determine the search volume for any given month from the previous year.
Interpreting The Graph
When you initially look at the trends graph it seems almost impossible to determine the search volume for “Christmas cards” in December of 2009. Don’t lose faith because there is a way. Previously I stated that Google uses the same search volume data set for the different tools it offers. Therefore when Google normalizes its data for Google Trends it is using the same data that the keyword tool uses. When looking at the trends graph we can assume that the average for the search volume that is set to one in Google Trends is the same search volume that is displayed in the keyword tool. In this example 368,000 search per month on average is equal to 1 in Google Trends. With that information we can start to determine the actual search volume. From the graph we can make a guess as to what the search volume was for December 2009 based off of the scale present in the graph, but there is a more accurate way to arrive at the number. If you have a Google account, Google will allow you to export actually historical numbers to excel. The export feature is located at the bottom left hand side of the page.
When exporting it is important to make sure that the relative scaling option is selected. This will show the search volume trends relative to the average. Once the data is exported we can make an accurate estimation of what the search volume was for month of December in 2009.
How Do You Put It All Together?
The final step is to average the four weeks of December and then multiply that result with the average search volume for all of last year.
In the case of “Christmas cards” we get (7.4*368,000) which comes out to be 2,723,200 searches for the month of December 2009. Although this this method gives us the search volumes for the previous year it is a safe assumption that the current year will be close to the number calculated. Now you can see how problematic determining seasonal keyword volume can be only using the Google Keyword Tool.
