Using Google Search Insights to Determine App Popularity

by Anita Campbell

August 13, 2008 at 8:52 am · Filed under AppGap Tips, Tips + Pointers

Let’s say you want to check out the competition. You want to see the states where your competitor’s products are most popular. One way to do that is to commission a market research study. Depending on the product, that could be expensive and the results difficult to obtain.

Or you could go to Google Search Insights and in 2 minutes get a quick and dirty snapshot, state by state, of product popularity.

Google Search Insights is a goldmine of data. And its use doesn’t need to be limited to competitor products.

Let’s say you are a Web designer, and you want to know if you should be offering templates and set-up services for certain software applications.

To show you how to use the Google Search Insights data, I tried an experiment. I checked Google Search Insights for two software applications: WordPress and AMember.

WordPress, no surprise, is pretty popular all over the United States (the deeper blue the color, the more searches in that geographic area):

WordPress popularity across United States

You can see, however, that WordPress is more popular in certain states than others, as judged by the number of searches using that word. California, Utah, Washington and Oregon have had the most searches since 2004.

Depending on which state your Web design business is located in, this could be helpful. It could be helpful even if you primarily market over the Web. For instance, if you were considering optimizing your business website for a local location, or wanted to run pay-per-click ad campaigns to advertise your services, or were considering which conferences and public events to exhibit at, this kind of geographical information could be a useful data point.

Google also breaks down the information by identifying specific search terms. Knowing those search terms is itself helpful.

But perhaps WordPress wasn’t the best example, because it is wildly popular all over the U.S. Let’s take an up-and-coming application that is less well known, a membership site software application called AMember.

AMember popularity by state

Now you see a very different picture — here the popularity is clustered in about 10 states, including Colorado, California, Texas, Florida and some others. This may give you good insights into how and where to market your development services for AMember.

Google Search Insights is certainly not the ONLY piece of intelligence you would use. The information has built-in limitations — for instance, it is based on search volume, not actual buying behavior. But as a rough indicator of public interest and demand, it’s useful information. And it’s free and only takes a few minutes to get.

You can run this kind of test with any product or online software application. You can also break it down by time period, and see growth trends over time, too. You can also compare popularity of an app in different countries all over the world.

How you use this data has endless possibilities — for instance, use it to determine the popularity of collaborative tools used in the workplace. Your imagination is the limit.

Go to Google Search Insights to run your own tests and experiments.

(Hat tip to Aaron Wall for the idea, who pointed out Google Search Insights in his SEOBook Community.)

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8 Comments »

I am always learning new things from great bloggers like yourself. I wouldn’t even know these types of apps existed without you. I make candles on the side, so I searched the term “candles”. I was nicely surprised to see that my state of PA is number 3 for the regional interest. I guess I should put more effort in targeting my local customers.

Like Amanda, I shouldn’t have known the existence of this application from Google. I tried it and it is really helpful for us in optimizing our business - the what and where to optimize! Really helpful!

I tried it and it’s awesome! It give me details such as: interest over time, regional interest and even the search terms related to my main search term. And it is very helpful in determining our business market and where to market it exactly. Thanks for that!

[...] Using Google Search Insights to Determine App Popularity (the app gap) [...]

Wow.. thanks for the heads up.. I didn’t know Google had this service! I’m going to blog about it

Glad you all liked this. Google Search Insights give you endless possibilities for using data.

1. United States
100
2. Australia
85
3. Sri Lanka
81
4. Canada
68
5. Singapore
68
6. Kenya
66
7. New Zealand
62
8. United Kingdom
62
9. Philippines
58
10. South Africa

I see plenty of old colonies to the British Empire and English speaking countries. I also see countries with a big tea and coffee industry. I then click on America and got regional interest for coffee and tea. This data could be leading indicator for my future business project. Where could I set up a meeting place with a coffee house and tea salon?

1. Washington
100
2. Oregon
100
3. California
98
4. Minnesota
97
5. Texas
95
6. Vermont
91
7. Colorado
91
8. Massachusetts
90
9. New York
90
10. Hawaii

[...] over at The App Gap, I wrote about using Google Insights to test a competitor’s foothold within different states. For instance, there I used it to create this state map showing search [...]

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