Step #1 Access the Keyword Planner from Google Ads
Step #2 Prepping the Analysis with Google Sheets
Step #3 Getting the total volume per month
Step #4 Getting Insights from your data
In this guide we will discuss how you can validate a business idea using tools from Google.
Specifically we will discuss:
- How to find a good market using competitor’s data
- See the seasonality trends
- Find if the market is growing or not
The tools we are going to use are Google Keyword Planner & Google Sheets.
You will also need:
- Access to a Google Ads Account
- Google Sheets
So let’s dig!
Access the Keyword Planner from Google Ads
You log in into the account go to “Tools” > “Keyword Planner”
Tools > Keyword Planner
Then a page will load. Choose “Start With a Website” ,choose an industry leader’s website and press “Get Results”
Don’t forget to choose the country you are targeting and the language
After that the page with the results will appear. In order to do a good analysis we need at least 24 months old data (we need this to compare monthly trends).
Also make sure you have excluded your competitors brand from the keyword ideas
After that your just need to press the “Download Keyword Ideas”
Prepping the Analysis with Google Sheets
After you upload the .csv file into Google Sheets (or Excel) you will get the data that look like this:
Raw data from Keyword Planner
After cleaning the file you should have a more concrete dataset
The columns you need are “Keyword” and volumes by month (e.x. “Nov 2018”, “Dec 2019”, etc)
Now we need to make sure that the numbers are actually numbers and not text.
To do that we need:
- Get all the numbers
- Click “Format”
- Click “Number”
- And then again “Number”
Making sure that our numbers are actual numbers
Getting the total volume per month
For our next step we need to find the total volume for each month.
In order to this we do the following:
- Add a new row below the “Keyword” row
- Use the “=SUM()” formula
- Do it for all the months
Creating the Total Volume Column
Getting Insights from your data
Now we have the Month, the Year and the total search volume for that specific website
We have the full search volume that the competitor is eligible to show for each month
Now we will create percentages in order to see emerging patterns
YoY Growth (per month)
For example in the following table we compare the search volume growth for each month. We see that from November to February we do not see much growth. Things do not look good 😞.
But from May to Oct we see a growth in search volume at least 30% each month 😃!!
This means that Shoes seasonality starts when the weather get warmer.
Finally if we get the volume for each year we will get the Year over Year Search Volume Growth.
We see here that from 2019 to 2020 the searches for shoe related keywords increased to 21.30%.
That means that going into this business is a good idea.
Now try that for yourself and comment below to share any insights 😃