To celebrate Google Trends’s 15th anniversary, we took a look at what questions about it have…well, trended. “How to use Google Trends?” and “how does Google Trends work?” were among the most-searched. So we decided to answer them with these 15 tips to help you get the most out of the tool and uncover interesting insights.
1. Data by date: Google Trends can tell you what people were searching for at any date from 2004 to a few minutes ago. It’s also based on two datasets: historic (2004-three days ago) and real-time (past week). Real-time is more granular, right down to minute-by-minute.
2. Trending versus top-searched:Trending (or rising) searches are those that are accelerating the fastest, while top-searched, or “most-searched,” are the most-searched queries in a specific time frame. Trending searches are useful for seeing how things have changed.
3. Choose topics when you can:When you start on Google Trends, you get the option to either search for a “term” or “topic.” We recommend choosing “topic” when possible. Topics are language agnostic and account for spelling variations (and mistakes!), as well as multiple names for the same thing.
