Industry News: Google Sets the Trend for Research?
The recent news that the Bank of England has turned to internet giant Google, for help in predicting trends within the economy, could herald a new and previously untapped resource for the wider market research industry.
The Bank of England, which usually relies upon the observations of analysts to formulate its economic policy, discovered that, by reviewing Google’s analytics of which search terms and keyword searches were used most frequently, they could predict financial trends within the economy before they happened.
One sector where this has proven to be particularly successful was within the housing market. The Bank of England noted that prior to any significant movement in the sale of properties, there was a sizeable increase in the number of Google searches for words relating to properties and mortgages.
The obvious advantage of this information is that the BOE can formulate strategies based on indications of future trends, as opposed to using current market activity which is often out of date by the time the policy has been made public.
The Bank of England is now planning to use this strategy to predict consumer behaviour on a number of products and services, ranging from televisions to their own popularity with the public. But could this data also be used by the market research industry?
Still in its infancy, the data requires a lot of interpretation and with Google being the only search engine provider to make these statistics publicly available there is obviously an element of bias to any kind of insight. But when entering into the costly process of market research, whether a national Qual panel or a large-scale Quant study, search engine analytics could provide an early indicator of consumer behaviour, helping to tailor the research towards specific insights or behaviours and enabling researchers to get right to the centre of whatever issues their clients are facing.
< Back to 2011 news
The recent news that the Bank of England has turned to internet giant Google, for help in predicting trends within the economy, could herald a new and previously untapped resource for the wider market research industry.
The Bank of England, which usually relies upon the observations of analysts to formulate its economic policy, discovered that, by reviewing Google’s analytics of which search terms and keyword searches were used most frequently, they could predict financial trends within the economy before they happened.
One sector where this has proven to be particularly successful was within the housing market. The Bank of England noted that prior to any significant movement in the sale of properties, there was a sizeable increase in the number of Google searches for words relating to properties and mortgages.
The obvious advantage of this information is that the BOE can formulate strategies based on indications of future trends, as opposed to using current market activity which is often out of date by the time the policy has been made public.
The Bank of England is now planning to use this strategy to predict consumer behaviour on a number of products and services, ranging from televisions to their own popularity with the public. But could this data also be used by the market research industry?
Still in its infancy, the data requires a lot of interpretation and with Google being the only search engine provider to make these statistics publicly available there is obviously an element of bias to any kind of insight. But when entering into the costly process of market research, whether a national Qual panel or a large-scale Quant study, search engine analytics could provide an early indicator of consumer behaviour, helping to tailor the research towards specific insights or behaviours and enabling researchers to get right to the centre of whatever issues their clients are facing.
< Back to 2011 news
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