How to do multicultural research with Google Insights or Where in the world will you find the most interest for Mercedes?

One of our favorite tools here at Ad Sheik when it comes to do multicultural keyword research, target group mapping or general trend search online is Google Insights for Search. If you’ve never used it, I suggest you head on over asap to see what kind of discoveries awaits you. The process is simple:

1. Add keywords (maximum amount of keywords are 5)
2. Filter by Time period, Country, Subregion or Category.
3. If needed, you can also run searches by Location or Time range.

Your results will come as a timeline to see chronological trends but also as world or country maps if you need to drill down even further in the data. Use it for brand awareness research. If you want to see where the brand “Mercedes” has it’s strongest followers it will show this interesting result:

Looking at the trendline you’ll see that it stays rather constant over the year(s) with a slight dip at the end of the year, but the most interesting thing happens when we look at the map. Here we see that the country that does the most searches yearly is Albania. With a population at only 3.6 million the brand Mercedes must have an incredibly strong foothold to hold the number 1 spot of searches  worldwide!
Germany on the number 2 feels more logical but number 3 is Azerbaijan and 5 is Lebanon – would be interesting to see the Mercedes’ sales figures in countries with a large Albanian, Azerbaijan or Lebanese migrant community.

Running a second search on the Spanish word for “flights” – “vuelos” for the US market gives us also some interesting results.

Google Insight search "vuelos" US

The state of Virginia comes out as number 1 ahead of Florida, Texas and California – what gives? Placed at number 16 in the US Hispanic population ranking by state, the Hispanic Virginians seem to be searching for flights as nobody else. The Hispanic online population is probably more mature in certain states but I doubt the 455 000 Hispanics living in Virginia can do more searches than the 12.1 million Hispanic people in California.
Worth noting that the number of searches for the word “vuelos” in the US is increasing drastically as this group starts to be more present online. If we would run a parallel search for the English word for “vuelos” – “flights” – we would see the trendline for “flights” being static and maintain the same level while “vuelos” increases month over month.

Finally, looking at the Eid holiday and running a search for “eid” in 4 European countries shows us which country comes out on top:

Google Insight search "eid"

UK on top with most searches – interesting to see the 2 search peaks happening before and at the end of the month of Ramadan. France, with a large muslim community, I would have expected to come out number 1 or 2 but the answer lies in doing a second search for France comparing the words “Ramadan” and “eid” instead:

Google Insights search France eid vs ramadan

The results shows clearly that the (Moroccan) muslims search for the word “Ramadan” instead of eid. Also interesting that the 2 spikes shown in the UK  keyword searches do not appear in the French keyword results for “Ramadan”. Instead we see an even line building up.

A couple of ways to do multicultural keyword search with Google Insight. Try it to see where your brand stands today worldwide or regionally or where your multicultural target group is. Together with other data sources it is a quick and handy tool for new search discoveries.

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