Last December, Google revealed the Top-10 Trending Cocktails in the US – based on Google Trends:
- Naked and Famous
- Azalea
- Brown Derby
- Revolver
- Gimlet
- El Presidente
- Bee’s Knees
- White Lady
- Last Word
- Sex on the Beach
Sounds like a great list of cocktails! Yummy 😛
Beware! While all of these cocktails are actually trending based on Google Trends data, some are actually not as trending as they used to be a few years ago.
This is caused by a common biais provided by Google Trends. Let’s see what we can do with Trajaan to reveal the truth behind the 2023 top-10 cocktails trends in the US 🙂
Beware! Google Trends aggregates values of similar queries
First of all, let’s bring to your attention some additional considerations for the initial top-10 list:
- “Naked & Famous” is not only a cocktail name but also a fashion brand specializing in denim and jeans. It is also a cool pop/rock band we highly appreciate.
- “Azalea“, aside from being a cocktail name, is also a well-known plant/flower.
- “Brown Derby“, despite being a cocktail name, is associated with a chain of restaurants in the US.
- “El Presidente” is not only a cocktail name but also a Amazon Originals series on Prime.
- and we have also “Revolver” with potential multiple diverse associations…
It seems clear that there can be some serious mistakes in insights detection – if these different significations are not considered differently.
The green line is supposed to describe search trends for Naked & Famous cocktail (as defined by Google Trends), while the other lines describe search trends for the pop/rock band (yellow), the jeans company (blue) or the exact search term (red).
It now makes sense that Naked & Famous is mostly searched in situations that do not relate to cocktails… But maybe it is still super trending, like a 4-digit growth?
Let’s deep dive in real-world search volumes to see what’s going on!
Google Trends is amazing to detect fads, use quantitative search volumes to analyze long-lasting trends
Time to create a search listening dashboard with Trajaan to analyze these so-called 2023 top-10 cocktails. To make sure we get accurate results, let’s only focus on search queries containing “cocktail“, “drink” or “recipe“, and one of these 10 cocktail names.
Here is the search volume evolution over the last 4 years in the US (aggregated by cocktail).
When examining recent trends (2023 vs. 2022), we get mixed feelings:
- “Revolver” and “Bee’s Knees” have shown a significant increase
- “White Lady” got a noticeable uptick
- “Brown Derby”, “El Presidente”, “Azalea”, and “Sex On the Beach” indicate a decrease.
All-in-all, 4 of the top-10 cocktails are definitely not trending in 2023. Again, we only focus on search queries containing terms such as “drinks,” “cocktail,” “ingredients,” and “recipe” or a spirit for instance.
Make sure to properly define what a trend should be for your organization
First of all, Google Trends makes a difference between exact search terms and their “native” topics (such as “Cocktail”). However, it appears that topics in Google Trends are closely associated Cocktails with the exact search terms, raising questions about the extent to which long-tail insights are integrated into this type of analysis.
Then, Google Trends represents search volume as a 100-index, with 100 indicating the highest weekly search volume. When exporting data from Google Trends and assessing the average on the 100-scale for the “Sex on the Beach” cocktails, trend analysis suggests a decrease in search volume in 2023 according to Google Trends.
Sex on the Beach:
2022 - 73
2023 - 65That is not what we can call a 2023 trending cocktail …
But surprisingly, when focusing on a shorter timeframe i.e. from January 2022 to December 2023, Google Trends spots an emerging trend! Google says: “Lists (ndlr: of top trends) are based on search terms that had the highest spike this year as compared to the previous year”.
Yeah, Google identifies outliers on a weekly basis, meaning the (projected) spike could just be a week in the year higher than the “top week” in the previous year …
Hopefully, looking at Google real data makes us realize this prediction is incoherent.
At Trajaan, we are committed to analyze both Google Ads and Google Trends databases – to make sure to reveal different types of trends.
As a consumer brand, make sure to work with enterprise-grade tools like Trajaan – relying on real search volume data, with serious statistical analysis, along with a team of experts here to help you set up and analyze all the different trends.
