Using Google Insights for Search for Seasonality Trends

Use the Google Insights for Search tool to check the seasonality of your major keywords. This tool also shows you countries, states, and metro areas that search highly for your terms.

According to Google, Insights for Search is a tool where users "can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames, and properties."

To use this tool, you need to visit www.google.com/insights/search/.

Insights for Search will show you when a search phrase is most popular during the year. If you are an advertiser with a seasonal product, it is very beneficial to be able to see when the peaks in your search traffic usually start and when you should turn your seasonal campaigns on.

For example, if you sell flowers, you could use the tool to see how far in advance of Valentine's Day you should start your "Valentine's Day" campaigns. Since you can probably only deliver flowers in the US, you are able to filter your results to show only the United States' search traffic. You can even filter by region if you're a local flower shop.

You can see the expected spikes happening each year starting in late January which is when you would want to turn on your Valentine's Day campaigns and take advantage of the early traffic.

However, you can also see another reoccurring spike that happens every May, probably indicating that people search for flowers to give to their moms on Mother's Day.

By using Insights for Search, you have found that another seasonal campaign is needed for your product, and will hopefully help you capitalize on traffic that other turkey suppliers are missing out on.

Other helpful uses for Insights for Search include:

• Finding search volume by geographic location


• Finding top search terms relating to your keywords


• Finding rising searches relating to you keywords

Using Google Analytics to Your PPC Advantage: Geo Targeting

Strategy: Using Google Analytics, you can see which cities and states are performing well, and you can create separate PPC campaigns for those areas with higher bids. Conversely, you can see which cities and states underperform, and you can isolate and bid them down or eliminate them altogether.

Google Analytics can reveal so much invaluable information about your online (and offline) marketing efforts, and uncovering where the majority of your traffic and customers come from is just one of the many important pieces of the marketing pie. Using different reports and segmentations in Google Analytics can shed light on where you should be focusing your marketing.

The Map Overlay report under the Visitors section (illustrated below) allows you to see number of visitors, revenue, goal conversion, and many other metrics for your website coming from anywhere in the world! You are able to click on a region and drill down further to see many different metrics within that region.

Another tip for finding out where your most valuable traffic or your trash traffic is coming from is to view any report and change your dimension targeting to Continent, Sub Continent Region, Country/Territory, Region, or even City.

Once you are able to pinpoint where you would like to target or exclude your traffic, you can alter your Google AdWords geo targeting to reflect what you've found.

Allowing your ads to display only in the areas that are most profitable for you and adjusting your campaign budgets to reflect where the best traffic comes from, can't help but boost the return on your AdWords investment!

We've got a few additional strategies to make your AdWords advertising drive more response & profit. Our CEO, Timothy Seward, has prepared his top 3 "undercover" tactics that we consider the cream of the crop. (Hint: there's a large-screen eight minute AdWords training video when you opt-in).

Get the three free AdWords strategies here!