If you haven’t been using Google Insights you really should check it out at http://www.google.com/insights/search/

As the name suggests, Google Insights is a powerful tool to give you different insights into specific markets and with the latest round of updates it took a big leap forward.

I won’t be explaining how to use Google Insights here but we’ll take a quick look at the new updates and how they can help you find more targeted buyers.

New Filters

One thing you’ll notice if you’ve used Insights before is that now there are a bunch of new filters that let you drill down into looking as more specific detail.

Previously, Insights only showed information about the standard Google Web search but now they have will show you Image search, News search and Product search.

How does this help you?

Image Search

Right off the top of my head, I can see how having Image search, which shows what images people are looking for, can direct you to finding products that people might be interested.

For example, I just did an image search on baseball because the baseball season in the U.S. has just started.

The results had “bat” and “baseball bat” as the 2 most popular image searches and when you click to drill down you can see which bats are the top bats being search and which are the ones that are rising fast.

If you sell that type of thing you now know how to better target your marketing and if you don’t, you now know some “hot” products that you can get into to make some quick cash.

Looking further down the list I saw that baseball logos was the 5th most popular image search and drilling down you can see that Yankees logos are pretty hot with the Chicago White Sox, Chicago Cubs and the Atlanta Braves as hot rising stars.

Again, if you have or if you can become an affiliate for (or even just find eBay products) this shows you ways to find hot products for some quick cash.

News Search

Do a News search on keywords in your niche and you can quickly find topics for articles and blog posts. These will be things that people are already highly interested in making your content more highly relevant to your customers and prospects.

Product Search

Like Image search, a Product search can give you insights into products in your niche that are currently in high demand or point out niches that might be good for you to enter.

Be sure you look at the Rising Searches to see what is up and coming so you can be ahead of your competitors.

Other Search Filters

In addition to showing you searches beyond the Web search, Google also added the ability to really drill down into specific regions.

For example, the U.S. is divided into 50 states and the states are divided into smaller things like counties and other things depending upon the state.

Google Insights now lets you drill down to that level to see what it popular in pretty much any specific region. In the past they just drilled down into major cities.

Another great new filter is a time based filter.

While Insights showed you trends over time it was basically showing you results since 2004. Now you can search just the last 7 days, last 30 days, last 90 days, last 12 months, pick a specific year (as long as it is this year and last), or even search between specific dates (again currently only for this year and last year).

As you can imagine, this really helps you focus specifically on your needs getting better, more detailed information that you could get before.

Other Changes

There are a number of other nice additions like better drill down capabilities and the new categories percentages.

The category percentages are really quite useful because they show you the intent of the people searching for the topic.

For example, since we saw baseball bats were very popular before, doing a Web search for “bats” shows that 25-50% of the searches are in the Sports category, with the rest of the search split between Entertainment, Local, Lifestyles. Shopping and Home & Garden.

You want to make sure your keywords are matching the searches so this is quite useful and you can even click on the categories and drill down further.

For example, if I click on Sports you’ll see that it says Baseball: 25-50%, Sporting Goods: 25-50%, Cricket: 10-25%, Racquet Sports: 0-10%

You can drill down and slice and dice all this in so many different ways letting what you see guide you in what directions to look at.

This can be a really powerful way to look at data and starts really moving into providing online business intelligence.

If you aren’t using Google Insights you really should look at it and if you are you’ll really enjoy the new updates.

I’d love to hear how you are using Google Insights so leave a comment and help us all (and get a link to your site!)

Talk soon,

The Shameless (Ethical) Marketer
http://www.8-8-8Sale.com
http://www.MusicForInternetMarketers.com
http://www.SecretsOfGoogleAdWords.com

This post from: Street Guide to Web Traffic. To read more post like this, head over to Street Guide to Web Traffic

Fantastic New Changes to Google Insights