Search listening and insights
Search listening is a way of understanding what people are saying about brands and markets and the questions that they are asking. It’s a powerful form of marketing and PR insight.
If we live our best lives on Instagram or Snap, we live our real lives on Google. That’s a favourite quote of Stella Bayles, director, AnswerThePublic.
We turn to the search engine to ask questions and seek out information that we wouldn’t ask anybody else. The search engine almost certainly knows more about us than our partner, parent, or children.
“There are 3.5 billion Google searches each day according to Internet Live Stats. Google is a powerful source of insight because the sample size is huge,” said Bayles.
In Europe and the US more than 95% of the online population uses Google on a frequent basis. It provides a good proxy for public opinion.
There’s another important statistic from Google itself. 15% of searches undertaken each day are new.
Search listening
It’s an observed form of research. People are searching because they need to know something. Unlike focus groups or surveys there is no bias either in the audience sample or the nature of responses assuming a digitally literate audience.
“The everyday reality of typing a work or phrase into a compact, rectangular white box leaves a small trace of truth that, when multiplied by millions, eventually reveals profound realities,” said Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, author of the New York Times bestseller Everybody Lies.
You can access the data for free in real time. It reflects current societal trends and interests.
Search listening vs social listening
Search listening is similar to its counterpart social listening. There’s a burgeoning tool industry grown up around social listening. This is based on interrogating data from social networks.
It is limited to information available from the open web and networks that provide APIs such Reddit and Twitter. It gives rise to a significant bias.
Native social listening using the search tools on social media platforms themselves is an alternative but arduous process.
There’s been a shift in public relations over the past decade to recruit data and analytic skills to support planning and measurement teams reflecting a shift to a data led approach.
Search listening is a technique that doesn’t require specialised analytics expertise. If you use Google for search queries, you’ll almost certainly be able to make sense of search listening.
Try search listening for yourself
As an introduction to search listening Sophie Coley, Co-Founder and Strategy & Content Director, Search Listening, recommends opening a browser and entering a query.
Search Listening is a specialist consumer insights consultancy. Sophie is the author of the book Consumer Insight in the Age of Google.
“Google will autocomplete with the most popular responses. These are predictions based on the most popular searches related to your search term,” says Coley.
Open Google in a browser. Use incognito mode and make sure that you aren’t logged into a Google account to ensure that you avoid personalised searches.
“If you click your mouse in the search query box, you’ll immediately see the most popular searches in the UK,” added Coley.
Today that includes news, dinner, supermarkets near me, last minute holidays and the weather. These are updated in real term as people use Google.
Now type ‘should I’ into the query box. Google will return the topics about which the UK public is currently seeking advice. These include:
covid test
be shielding
self isolate
pop a blister
get a flu jabs
You can quickly see how it's possible to get insight and how this could be used to inform a communication or content strategy.
Google applies limited editorial intervention. It removes predictions related to sex, hate, violent and dangerous activities.
Case study: listening to Newcastle
Google Trends is a good place to start. It’s a website that enables you to analyse the top search queries in Google Search across various regions and languages. The tool can be queried by country, time (hour to years), categories and search type.
Trends provide an insight into how people are searching for information related to topics. It returns search volumes over time as a percentage of the peak. Breakdowns by region and related terms are also shown. There’s also an option to compare multiple queries.
A search trends comparison in the past 90 days shows the correlation between COVID-19, lockdown, and jobs in my own city of Newcastle. Employment and economic security are underlying issues in the city that are heightened by COVID-19 and lockdown.
To discover the type of queries that people are making about Newcastle head about to Google and query Newcastle with prepositions such as is, can, without, or for. You’ll quickly get an insight into the information that people are searching for about the city.
AnswerThePublic is a tool that shortcuts this process and presents the results in a visual layout.
A search for Newcastle returns queries about the football team, culture, locations, COVID, and jobs, among other things. A more granular search such as ‘Newcastle COVID-19’ returns:
infection rates
testing locations
lockdown
schools
hotspots
rules
universities
Within three or four queries using Google, Google Trends, and AnswerThePublic you’ve got the basis of a communication strategy, content plan and tone of voice. It has applications for profile, reputation and crisis communications.
A paid version of AnswerThePublic ($99 per month for a single user) enables you to compare searches over time. This is useful for a historical context to understand how search queries are shifting. A new feature provides alerts about search queries once a week.
I’ve been working with the team at AnswerThePublic to explore the opportunity to develop a version of the tool for crisis and emergency response.
