Google recently added a new traffic estimation tool to their AdWords keyword tool called Google Insights. It is an upgrade on Google Trends and Google Ad Planner, giving you more flexibility and functionality. This tool helps you to understand users’ search behaviour and allows you to establish trends and rising searches. Like Google Trends, you can just type in the search term to see the search volume patterns over time. You have to be logged into your AdWords account in order to access it.

Some of the things you can do with Google Insights:

• Relative keyword search trends for keywords, as well as A/B keyword comparisons (displayed on a graph).
• Top related keywords and hottest rising related keywords (displayed in a table below the search volume graph).
• Category based keyword search volume trends.
• Countries, states and cities where a keyword query is popular (displayed on a map alongside the related search terms).

Example:
Comparing Search Terms:  African Safari and Safari in South Africa
Category: Travel
Time Period: Last 12 months
Location:  UK

Results:

This tool is useful for comparing generic search terms to more specific ones. This will allow you to see how the news, marketplace and even the economy can change the relative importance of these terms over time. You can also apply this to your brand terms and see how your brand is ranking compared to competitors.

From these trends you can also see when your marketing strategies are doing really well at any given time, and then boost your advertising through other marketing mediums. For Adwords advertisers this is useful as you can increase your media spend for this successful period and boost performance during these times.

These top searches are also helpful for PPC marketing. They can help you identify the top searches at any given time which you can add to your campaign if you don’t already target them. In addition you can use the rising search terms to boost your campaign performance in the future.

There are loads of other statistics that you can delve deeper into, and I would urge you to go play around with this tool because it can be extremely useful in PPC campaign management.

The only set back that I see for myself as a South African advertiser, however, is that it does not give you any data when searching for South Africa as a location. I have often struggled to find both keyword research and traffic estimation tools for relevant search volume in South Africa. Other than that, big ups to Google, it’s a fantastic tool!