Monday, June 13, 2011

Google Correlate

Given our introduction into cool tools on the internet (i.e. Google Insights, The Wheel) in our digital marketing class – I set out about trying to see what else Google has to offer in this space. Primarily, I was curious to understand what other insights we could gain from people’s search patterns and behaviors. I will focus on one tool that particularly intrigued me – Google Correlate.

It was officially launched at the end of May on GoogleLabs and essentially flips the concept of Google Trends and Insights in that instead of entering a search term and seeing the trend, you enter a trend of a real world activity and see which search terms best match that trend.

The Google Correlate journey actually started with analyzing flu trends. Google compared time series for millions of search queries with the actual influenza data to find the queries that best correlated with flu trends...they found that certain search terms were surprisingly good indicators of actual flu activity. Google correlate allows you to use your own time series data and the output is a set of search queries that are best correlated with the your ‘real world’ time series data.

Now you are thinking ‘ well what if I don’t have time series data – just a term I’d like to check’. Of course there is a solution for this too. Lets say we type in ‘sunglasses’ the correlation data shows that the term ‘fossil sunglasses’ is most highly correlated with this term. Fossil is actually a brand of sunglasses so we might infer that they recently launched an ad campaign which influenced search behavior. See the results by clicking on this link: http://correlate.googlelabs.com/search?e=sunglasses&t=weekly

Like all other things Google – the beauty is in the simplicity of use yet the wealth of information and insights you can draw from the output. An interesting question posed by a web article on this topic was when hedge funds will start using this – any digital marketers/financiers in the class want to take a punt?

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