In one of my previous articles, I discussed the rivalry between the two global high tech giants: Apple from California and Samsung from South Korea. I concluded that, despite an intense patent war between these companies, there is a very interdependent relationship between them.
Meanwhile, Exo Marketing’s objective is to propose simple and informative articles for “non-experts” in B2B marketing (for example here or there). For the experts, I suggest you read the latest blog post by my colleague David. For the rest of you, Google Trends is used today to make cross-comparisons of web searches on Apple and Samsung.
Google Trends: what is it?
Google Trends is a free tool that can, with an analysis of search volumes, provide a general overview of the history and trends related to the interest generated by one or several search terms. This tool allows for competitive intelligence monitoring and makes available major regional and historical information as well as estimated future trends.
Apple and Samsung: interests for yesterday, today and tomorrow?
In our example, when you go to Google Trends you can add “Apple” then “Samsung” to the search terms. Once the graph below appears, you can click on “Forecast.”
This first graph demonstrates the evolution over time (past, present and future) of the search terms “Apple” and “Samsung.”
Figures are good, but explanations are better!
Some notes (identified with letters on the graph) explain the main recent variations. Thus, when you click on the peak identified by the letter “F,” you’ll see that the increase in search volumes linked to “Apple” in October 2011 can be explained by the death of its founder, Steve Jobs.
World, Wide, Who?
Now if you enter the search terms individually (“Apple” or “Samsung”), you will get the geographic origin. You’ll see that the term “Apple” is mainly searched for in Western countries (the United States, Canada, Australia, Great Britain, etc.) while the search volumes for “Samsung” occur mostly in Asia.
Do you want a doggy bag for the rest?
Still taking search terms individually, Google Trends also suggests a list of related terms (which can be displayed by top terms or by rising terms). This could be very useful for your content strategies.
Once again, Google has made available to all managers a basic, simple and user-friendly tool. Once the small hurdles of this tool are overcome (high search volume, etc.), I hope that this blog post will be useful to you!
