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Search Trends vs Search Volumes

The difference between search trends and the search volume.

Rodrigo Pozo Graviz avatar
Written by Rodrigo Pozo Graviz
Updated over 2 years ago

When starting to track a brand or campaign using Share of Search analysis you have two options: either doing it yourself or using a share of search tool using Search Volumes like MyTelescope.
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Google Trends is one of the datasets you get access to in MyTelescope and is an excellent starting point for tracking trends and the impact campaigns have on brand interest. However, MyTelescope’s main analysis is based on real search volumes. In this video, we will compare the two so you can decide which best works for you.

Google Trends:

Google Trends is a tool provided by Google that allows users to see how frequently a particular search term is entered into Google search engines relative to the total search volume across various regions of the world over time. This can be helpful for understanding the popularity of a particular topic or term and can be used to track trends and changes in search behavior.

The drawback to Google Trends is that it automatically selects the keywords related to your search query to its best ability, which sometimes includes topics that are not related to your brand. The second drawback is that it only takes a sample of all searches to create the index, making it hard for small brands or topics to get consistent reliable data.

Google Trends is an index where a sample of Google searches on automatically selected related keywords to a topic are collected to compute how many searches have been done for the brand or topic entered. These searches are made relative to the total number of searches done on Google over the same time to normalize them. Out of this, a number is given ranging from 0-100 where 100 is the maximum interest.
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What are the pros and cons of this method?
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Pros:

  • It’s free

  • You can get historical data all the way back from 2004.

Cons:

  • You lack control or insight into what search terms are included in your analysis

  • As it is a sample of all searches, if a topic or brand is relatively small there will be no data or very inconsistent data that might look different for each month.

  • The index is sensitive to large increases in a short time, this might result in an index jumping up and down from 0-100.

  • You are limited to 4 competitors

  • To create a Share of Search you need to manually download the data each month, smooth out the data using rolling averages and then calculate the Share of Search.


Search Volumes

MyTelescope’s system is based primarily on Google Search volumes, firstly it shows you the related search terms to a brand or topic with each of the real numbers of times the keyword has been searched for over the last month and year.
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Pros:

  • Full control over what search terms go into your analysis (especially good for generic brand names like Apple)

  • Works for small brands/sub-brands and you can therefore be more granular looking at your Share of Search for specific products, core offerings, etc.

  • You can look at up to 9 competitors

  • Your Share of Search is automatically calculated, updated and shown per month and its development over time.

  • You can see which underlying search terms to explain what has driven your Share of Search for each month.

Cons:

  • A small cost per month

  • 12 months of historical data

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