Review: Trajaan vs. Google Trends

Ever wondered why all search listening platforms are not free like Google Trends? Check it out now 🙂

Google Trends: The Pioneer.

On the 5th of August, 2008, Google Insights for Search was launched – as an advanced service to monitor search data trends. On the 27th of September, 2012, Google rebranded Google Insights for Search as Google Trends. 

Google Trends is a website that analyzes the popularity of top search queries in Google Search across various regions and languages. The website uses graphs to compare the search volume of different queries over time. Google Trends provides access to a large unfiltered sample of actual search requests made to Google. 

Google Trends enables users to get the interest for a particular topic from around the globe or down to city-scale geography, in a given country.

A great place to start listening to online searchers

Google Trends is easily accessible and freely available.

The data Google is collecting is valuable because of its continuity and global data collection. 

There is no such thing as a survey providing fresh data each week, across all geographical borders. 

Because Google Search is the most used search engine in the world, Google Trends can represent a good percentage of all people with free access to the Internet.

But a lack of accuracy in search volume estimation.

Long story short: Google Trends doesn’t exactly tell you how many searches occurred for your topic, but it does give you a nice proxy.

The main issue with Google Trends is the search data normalization. Search volumes are normalized to the time and location of a query, with the following process:

• Each data point is divided by the total searches of the geography and time range it represents to compare relative popularity. Otherwise, places with the most search volume would always be ranked highest.
• The resulting numbers are then scaled on a range of 0 to 100 based on a topic’s proportion to all searches on all topics.
• Different regions that show the same search interest for a term don’t always have the same total search volumes.

A lack of depth to detect weak signals.

Google Trends does not provide much insight for all queries exceeding 5 terms – which are commonly considered as weak signals.

Of course, these searches are rather rare. Yet it is still a limitation in the process, especially considering all the people typing for specific questions:

• Best French restaurant in Manhattan
• Is aloe vera good for acne?

No SEO competitive benchmark

Google Trends does not offer any actionable insights into SEO performance and should not be used for online SEO analysis. It is simply a tool which gives an indication of the popularity of certain topics and keywords on the web over a given time frame, and should not be used to measure success or failure of SEO campaigns.

Pros 

• Free
• Simple to use
• Useful to test if a query is a strong signal in multiple countries

Cons 

• No exact search volume (index from 0 to 100)
• Comparison is limited to 5 different search terms
• No weak signal analysis
• No built-in framework for market research or SEO performance

Trajaan: The First Enterprise-Grade Solution

Trajaan has been launched in 2021 to help global brands & consultancies extract strategic value from search engine data. Based on a clear vision: fast-moving consumer expectations can be monitored from large-scale search data analyses. 

Trajaan has been designed to tackle three major issues in the retail and consumer goods industries:

• Detect emerging needs & categories

• Monitor brand awareness across dozens of countries and local regions

• Find out the perfect product mix & merchandising to increase conversions

Get your search data unified.

Think outside the bot! There is a world of search engines beyond Google. 

With Trajaan, you can blend all the alternative search engines data sources such as Amazon, Baidu, or Bing (the second search engine in North America – and even your 1st-party data sources.

Discover new queries.

You can ask Trajaan if there is a significant search volume for any search query you have in mind.

Then our tool provides you with other similar queries driving even more interest. Our algorithms guarantee the identification of more than 95% of the volume of search queries associated with a market. Trends on 5 keywords are good. Over 5000 is better!

A great feature to start your research with hundreds of significant queries – so that you can map everything consumers are searching for about your market.

Segment all your queries

Tracking hundreds or thousands of search queries is great to make sure you get a big picture of your market.

But it can lead to long-lasting analyses, if you consider each query one by one. 

The best strategy is to group similar queries – so that you can get analyses for each group of queries.

That process is called segmentation, where you create meaningful groups of queries you want to monitor.

Think macro, not micro!

Control data quality

Trajaan contains specific algorithms to identify duplicate queries – before. you get access to your analytics dashboard: 

• Typos: queries that are too similar, like typos or singular/plural
• Volume clusters: queries whose search volume is considered as identical by Google or Amazon, as search intent is allegedly the same (e.g. PSG & Paris Saint-Germain)
• Volume modified: queries whose volume has been modified over time by Google – thus providing “false positives” in trend detection or alerting

KPIs & alerting scripts

With Trajaan, you just get automated reports on-demand, when you need them. 

Our platform provides simple access to a large set of charts and data tables co-constructed with leading references in the strategy consulting world. 

Our analytics framework is to make trend detection easier, with a built-in growth matrix, rankings of geolocations with higher affinity for your brand and products – or with seasonality effect analysis. 

Consider our platform as a cockpit to monitor in real-time fast-moving consumer expectations. Take a look, see from above & be prepared for your next strategic move

Pro services

You are not alone! 

Everyone at Trajaan is here to help you understand how to take advantage of search engine data. 

You don’t have the time to translate a market into search queries and segment the query plan? No problem, our team is there to set up new platforms & send your detailed reports about consumers’ wants. 

Pros 

• Multisource (Google, Amazon, 1st-party data…)
• Query discovery
• Query segmentation
• AI for data quality
• Built-in KPIs
• Alerting scripts
• Pro Services

Cons 

• More complex: onboarding session is required
• Easy to get lost in the ocean of data facts
• More expensive