Google Insight is an excellent new addition to the Google toolbox of gadgets – effectively it is like Google Trends on steroids.
I used the benchmark term for www.selfcateringhols.com – it should come as no surprise to anyone that this is ‘self catering holidays’ – left most of the filters at the default apart from the categories filter, from which I selected ‘Travel’. Immediately the 1st insight came to light, as it said that the travel category only accounted for 25% of searches using this term. A bit of experimentation showed that recreation accounted for 10%, so what accounted for the majority? Local searches – so people are search for self catering [region] i.e. self catering france or self catering cornwall.
This we already knew, but I find it a good way to test a tool is to test it against a reality that you can compare it against. Other things that came to light was that (again no great surprise) pretty much nobody outside of the UK uses the term ‘self catering holidays’, and that when compared against ‘villa rentals’ it still gets more traffic but that the gap has been closing steadily since 2004.
By being able to compare terms against each other, over time and also location, it enables you to very specifically target your client base. Throw in ‘last minute holidays’ into the mix and you can see that overall this phrase accounts for about 50% of the annual total of self catering holidays, but that most of this is in one big august spike, so one worth going after.
Something I didn’t know was that northern ireland users do not use either ‘self catering holidays’ or ‘villa rentals’ but they do use ‘last minute holidays’, so even using phrases which I thought I knew inside out I learned something.
Finally, scroll down to the bottom of the page and you get a list of the top phrases using your keywords, so ‘self catering france’ is the king of the pile, along with a list of searches which are increasing in popularity even if they are not currently at the top of the list at the moment.
This latter is obviously a very valuable resource – the terms that people use over time change, see self catering holidays and villa rentals as a perfect example. When you invest a lot of time, effort and sometimes money into branding your site for a specific set of phrases it can be a slow boat to turn around should you decide to abandon your initial choice, so the earlier you spot a change in trends the better.
Google analytics Benchmark reports
Google have a new report (still in Beta) which is quite interesting – it allows you to add your site data to the general community so that you can then compare your stats against those of the other contributing sites, all anonymously obviously.
Within the general community you can narrow things down by selecting the category most appropriate to your site; within each category there is a minimum of 100 contributing sites.
It’s a great tool, the only thing that I don’t like is that Google makes a value judgement on your site and categorises it as small, medium or large. I think this relates to the amount of traffic your site receives. The stats to which you are benchmarked against are those of similar size (i.e. so if your site is categorisd as small you will see benchmark stats from other ‘small’ sites). The problem is that Google doesn’t tell you which category your site falls into, so you can look at your stats and they might be showing x% more visitors than average, but you don’t know if that makes you a big fish in a small pond (i.e. you’ve been categorised as a small site) or whether you’re actually performing well in the medium or larger size categories.