Use Google Trends to Improve Google Ads Performance

Have you ever wanted to know in which months your prospects are more likely to be searching for something you sell? Or did you ever wish you could capitalize on recent trends to promote your brand?

Then you need to get familiar with the Google Trends tool.

Imagine you’re a sports medicine practice. You want to set up a campaign that coincides with sports injuries throughout the year. Sure, you could look at your own patient data, but that may not align accurately with when prospective patients are searching online.

How to Find When and Where People Are Searching

By using Google Trends, you can take a peek at the search terms being used throughout the year for your specialty. This way, you can create ads and target specific keywords when there’s a high likelihood people will be searching for them.

By entering “sports injuries” into Google Trends, we receive these results:

As we can see, people search for sports injuries much more from about February to April. Then there's a huge dip until people start searching more in September until the holidays. To capitalize on this trend, you'll want to allocate more of your ad budget from February to April and from September to November vs. May to August and December to January, when there will be fewer searches.

Google Trends will also show you a longer timeframe, like the last five years, so you can see if the trend consistently repeats every year and if more or fewer people are searching each year.

The graph above shows us that the same dip in search popularity for "sports injuries" occurs consistently every year in the summer.

Capitalizing on Trending Topics

Discovering what is popular now will help you see if you have a chance to capitalize on it before it fizzles out.

For instance, at the time of writing this article, the fifth-most trending search was related to sports and one of the popular articles was "What really works when it comes to sports recovery?"

That tells us there's currently a lot of interest in the topic of sports recovery, which could be a good angle for an ad campaign.

Anticipate Trends

By studying Google Trends, you can spot early trends. While this takes much more effort, experience and knowledge to get it right, it can be quite effective, if done correctly.

Because you’ll be way ahead of those who haven’t anticipated the trend, you’ll have a nice competitive advantage.

Using Related Search Queries

You can use the related search queries in Google Trends to get additional ideas for ad campaigns. For instance, if you search for trending information on "hats," you'll see the following related trending searches.

If your business sells hats, then you'll immediately see an opportunity to promote Kentucky derby hats, because that is the No. 1 related keyword that is trending right now.

Getting to Know Google Trends

Google Trends holds a lot of important information you can use for your Google Ads campaigns. Take some time to research the trends, learn how trends happen (usually when breaking news hits), and how you can jump on short-living trends, as well as the seasonal ones. And don’t forget about looking into those related queries to find additional ideas for ad campaigns.

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