Trendspotting

One of most important aspect for the success of any Google Adwords campaign is choosing the right keywords apart from across bidding the right price. That's why my favourite google app is Google Trends

Google trends is an app that tells you what the world is searching for. Literally! You get to know how popular your search term is and which part of the world is searching for it. I'll tell you how I used this app in my Adwords campaign.

In my previous company, us marketing folks got to play around with Google Adwords as corporate dearest was funding the whole project. It was quite fun and they loved it when we wanted to experiment with some of the search words, especially to settle the debate between them "long tail" type keywords versus the popular more expensive keywords. So my company was hosting this huge seminar for customers and I wanted use the power of the net to drive traffic to the site. I was playing with Google trends and happned to type in the word "Seminar" and saw that a lot of people in India were searching for the term. I bought the keywords and created an AD for the Event. Within 15 days it was my highest performing keyword. Ofcourse we also tested to see if there were any clicks on the landing page and it was fairly decent. That's why I *heart* the net so much. It gives you so much data to make the right choice.

Google trends also in a way lets you check out the "buzz" about your product versus your competition. Take for example, the comparison between people searching for Myspace, Facebook and orkut in india

Orkut is clearly the hands down winner and if you were a marketer wouldn't this information be priceless? Trends also throw up other curve balls. It also lets you pick a region to find what the buzz is in every part of the region. For the same comparison as above, I selected India region to see which part of the country was searching the most on these keywords. The results were as follows:What's surprising is that non metro cities are searching for orkut. Not so surprising as its already popular in the metros I suppose. Still very good data to work with when say launching a product

I also recently stumbled upon the Orkut Trends Blog, where the google team shares some interesting stats on Orkut usage and user perceptions. This might come in very handy if you're considering doing some social networking marketing in your campaign