How to use Google Trends to evaluate your startup idea market
When researching a startup idea, Google Trends is one of the most valuable resources to analyse your market. Here are 5 ways to use the tool to get insights, which might change the way you think about your idea.
1. Trend Over Time
The simplest and most typical use of trends is to see how the Google search volume for your idea is changing over time.
Simply put in your search team, and change the date filter to the longest period available (2004 at time of writing). You can see here, A/B testing has been on a steady growth path for the last 15 years!
Things to look out for here:
- Growing or declining: what is the trend of your market? Is this correlated to some other trend?
- Steady or spiked: a spiked chart going up and down from 0 to 100 suggests a very low search volume.
- Seasonality: are certain times of year more relevant for your search?
- Key events: certain inflection points, where the volume changed
Important to note, all charts are relative, meaning relative to the maximum volume achieved in that time window.
2. Spelling Variants
Be careful to check different spelling variants of your search. People can vary in their punctuation or phrasing when they search, and you’ll want to capture the whole search traffic in your analysis.
3. Benchmark for Volume & Correlation
Adding a second search team for comparison enables multiple new avenues of investigation.
Things to try:
- Volume benchmark: e.g. if you work for mixpanel, you’ll likely know the approximate volume of search traffic — so adding this in gives you an idea of the volume of your other search term
- Competitor check: try the name of products already in the market, and see the trend of their searches
- Correlated trends: try phrases from the “related queries” box below to find associated searches and examine the correlation
4. Geography Lesson
You may be interested to understand where in the world your idea might have the most traction. Use the map for this! Be careful though of language and localisation considerations.
5. Channel Checks
Finally, you might be surprised to find that web search is not the only Google channel relevant for your idea! Don’t forget to check Image search and YouTube search using the channel dropdown.
Summary
There’s plenty more you can do with Google Trends, but these steps are a great place to start and you’ll more than likely discover something you didn’t already know about your market.
