In this post I would like to show you how to use Google Correlate to strengthen your brand.

Google Correlate is part of Google trends. It allows you to detect trends over time and space (countries). In winter months for example, mittens will clearly increase in searches. Thereby it shows search terms that most correlated to mittens, such as snow hats and waterproof gloves. So Google Correlate will look for matching patterns in your search volume.

Example. Let me take this into a case study. Image you work for the hair product company, Herbal Essences. The most important search term for you might then be “Shampoo”. When looking at for example The United States, one can see that the search term “shampoo” correlates most with “dry hair”. This might mean you want to pop up when searchers enter “shampoo dry hair” in their google search.

It is also interesting to see when people search for “shampoo” online. When entering “shampoo” in google correlate you will see a graph from 2005 till 2013 showing you an increase in search for “shampoo”. This is simply as people currently use the internet more. If you drag your mouse over a certain year however, you will be able to see the increases in search per month. In the year from 2012 to 2013 most people looked up the words “shampoo” and “dry hair” in summer. This might mean that you want to launch a campaign for shampoo against dry hair in the summer of 2014.

In this blog post, I would like to show you how brands can make great usage of Google Adwords, using the example the brand “Snickers”.

Snickers, the daughter brands of Mars Incorporated, launched in 2012 the campaign “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry”. Showing that people are not themselves when they are craving food.In 2013 Snickers teamed up with Google to target hungry people online. As hungry people tend to make more spelling mistakes, Snicker used Google Adwords to reach people making spelling mistakes.

When somebody made a spelling error in a Google search, the following ad would appear saying: “Yu cant spel properlie wen hungrie Grab yourslef a Snikkers”.

Their approach: Snickers obtained a list of the top 500 search terms and then used an algorithm to work out the most common 25 000 misspelled searches and bid on terms for them all. Examples are wether, gool, amazin, definitely, weird, publically and facw. As you can see from these examples, the misspellings are not snicker-related. They wanted to show the misspeller, that he/she might be tired and a snicker could help.

Success? It cost Snickers almost nothing and within three days of launch, the ad reached over 500 000 people. The CTR (Click-through rate) of 1.05% was impressive, and brought nearly 6,000 visitors to their tailored campaign website.

Conclusion: The goal of the misspelling campaign was to get the brand out their in a unique way. Looking at this goal I believe Snickers has made great usage of online google techniques to strengthen their brand.