Google Trends (trends.google.com) is a fun and useful way to keep tabs on the search volume of just about anything. Enter a term into the search box and see a graph of the term’s search volume since 2004. The real value comes when you compare two or more terms in the same graph - this provides a great view into the relative popularity of the requested terms.

The ubiquitous example in Boston is “red sox, yankees” - as you can see the two graph lines hold very close except in October 2004 when the Sox won the World Series.

However, this site is about vacation rentals, so we will spare you from our obsession of Red Sox nation.

What is more popular, vacation homes or vacation condos?

Google Trends: “vacation rental” vs “vacation home” vs “vacation condo”

As you can see, “vacation home” outpaces “vacation condo” by an approximately 2-1 margin. The generic “vacation rental” term makes a good baseline to compare the relative popularity of “vacation home” and “vacation condo”.

What popular vacation destination is the most searched for?

Google Trends: “outer banks” vs “cape cod” vs “lake tahoe” vs “vail” vs “myrtle beach”

A bit of an upset here - I would not have guessed “outer banks” to come in dead last. Myrtle takes the crown with the Cape coming in a close second.

While all of the above data is perfectly valid, it doesn’t give you much more than a crude directional metric. We suggest you use Google Trends as a fun exploratory tool, but avoid using it for anything beyond “oh, that’s interesting” based analysis.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 28th, 2007 at 11:34 am and is filed under Food for Thought, Market Statistics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.