“Google it” has become a phrase synonymous with looking something up on a web browser when a question needs to be answered. Gone is the time when people went to libraries for research, our culture has evolved to the point where we can now get our questions answered in seconds. That accessibility, however, comes at a cost. The price? Our personal data.
While you may be imagining a massive room with endless rows of towering machines and flickering lights that stores all this data (though that’s probably true too), the truth is, almost anyone can access the information and use it to their benefit. Social marketers and data analysts can break down this data to gain valuable insight into trends analysis, keyword monitoring and advertising spending statistics. This is also known as Search Engine Data Analytics and it’s often used to better-understand what audiences are interested in, in real time.
An example of this kind of data exploration tool is Google Trends, which uses search engine data to analyze the world’s interests to predict trends. Social marketers can use this tool to figure out how people search for their brand, what keywords they’re using, whether interest spikes are seasonal, how competitors are doing and even explore trends geographically.
Laying out a scenario
As a way to explore Google Trends a bit more this week, I wanted to imagine what it would be like to be a social media manager for a coffee company looking to expand business in Texas. The goal would be to open 10 drive-thru coffee shops in the next 12 months and then doubling that number the following year. The success of the first cluster of shops is vital for the future of this coffee company so I’d also need to lock down two neighboring states my coffee shop could grow in. My job as the head of social media? To conduct research using Google Trends so I could report my findings to management.
I wanted to get a baseline as to where we were starting so the first keyword I searched for was “coffee.” I limited my search to just Texas during the last five years and specified that it was in the Food & Drink category and was searched using the web. The chart above represents Google Trend’s Interest Over Time, which depicts interest relative to the highest point in the chart for a specific region and time. A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the time period, 50 means it’s half as popular and zero would mean there wasn’t enough data in that specific term. Though it may not look like it at first glance, the term “coffee” has been increasing steadily in Texas since October 2016 with its peak on December 24-26, 2020. Based on personal experience, the peak could be attributed to people searching for nearby coffee shops that are open on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.
The data also highlighted Interest by Metro, which revealed that the top five cities searching for that keyword are Austin, Waco, Wichita Falls, Dallas-Fort Worth and El Paso. I was extremely surprised that smaller Texas cities like Waco and Wichita Falls made the list (and pretty high on the ranking at that), but larger cities like San Antonio and Houston did not. While also initially confused by El Paso being on the list, I deduced that it’s because it’s a border town with a large number of new and rotating Border Patrol agents who may be searching for places to get their caffeine fix.
Some of the related topics and queries I found were Dalgona coffee, which can be attributed to its popularity on TikTok in April of 2020 early in the pandemic. Everyone was talking about this whipped coffee and trying it out for themselves— myself included— but it’s interesting that it’s been more than a year and it’s still the top topic. Other notable topics and queries include cold brew and keto coffee, both making a big impact online the last couple of years.
For the most part, people don’t generally consider the state of Texas as a coffee hotspot. Those titles are reserved for places like New York, Seattle or Portland. Even so, I was not expecting Texas to be ranked 35 in the country in coffee searches, especially since it’s a huge state so you’d think the larger population would give us a few extra value points (it did not).
My next question was, if this drive-thru coffee shop were to expand, where would it go? The issue with Texas is that it’s big. Like big-big. It’s so big that 15 of the smallest U.S. states could fit within Texas simultaneously. You could drive 16 hours and still be in this state. Over the weekend, I flew from McAllen, TX to Dallas,TX (yes, it’s actually faster to fly from one city in this state to another) for an education conference because otherwise it would have taken me 11 hours to get there and 11 hours to get back. All this to say that I knew I had an obstacle: finding states this coffee shop could expand to and be successful in despite the size of their large neighbor.
Ideally, it would make sense to start our 10 coffee shops in our own state throughout our larger metropolitan cities such as Austin, San Antonio, Dallas, Houston, McAllen, El Paso, Corpus Christi, Laredo, Brownsville and South Padre Island. Those 10 cities span throughout our entire state and could probably do extremely well in each area. If in 24 months we were to keep growing and using our data, research and SEDA, I believe the two neighboring states this coffee chain would have most success in are New Mexico and Louisiana. My logic behind these particular states is that when any Texans make their way up to the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas or DisneyLand for a road trip, they’ll have to drive through New Mexico. Same goes for Louisiana and those wanting to get to New Orleans or Disney World in Florida.
Of the two states, New Mexico is a little more desolate which means there may be fewer options for coffee, so this gives our new coffee shop a higher chance of succeeding. Louisiana on the other hand is a lot livelier as you reach New Orleans so it may have more competition, but it can do well too if we’re able to place it at the right location.
Conclusion
Using the data I analyzed, my recommendation to management would be to start our 10 locations across our state first, then branch out to our neighbors in New Mexico and Louisiana.
There was so much data I was able to extract from just searching the keyword “coffee” and so much more you can discover on Google Trends. If you’d like to see how interest in a topic has changed, terms related to a topic, compare phrases or even when interest in a topic peaks or diminishes annually, you can find it using this tool. Knowing how to use data like this was incredibly eye-opening and can be even more helpful to social marketers and social media managers who make the decisions that help their respective brand succeed.