How to visualise Google Trends data?

If you are reading this article, chances are that you are already familiar with Google Trends, and looking to up your game by visualising the data you can get from there. The tool is especially useful for tracking how people’s search interest changes over time and what topics, events, or people are the most popular in which country, or not at all – depending on what story angle you might want to take.

What can you search for on Google Trends?

There are a few things to watch for when starting your initial search. You can use the tool to look at topics, time frames and locations, and although it is pretty intuitive, here are a few tricky aspects to be aware of when getting data that is intended to be visualised.

• Topics and search terms: there are usually a few options you’ll be given when searching for a phrase and the ‘topics’ one is language agnostic, meaning that it accounts for synonyms and misspellings, and makes it more reliable than using the ‘search term’.

• Time frames: the search data goes back to 2004 and there are different options of time frames you can choose from, including a custom one that you set yourself. However, the latest data, which is for the past hour or day, might not provide you with some details since it is still being processed.

• Related searches: if you would like to visualise data based on the related queries and choose the ‘rising’ option, anything that has had search interest over 5000% will be labelled as ‘breakout’ and can’t be used for visualisations since we are dependent on numeric values. In such cases it is better to switch to the ‘top’ option.

You can compare up to 5 topics, but the Google Trends team can be contacted if you would like to analyse more.

How to use Google Trends data?

Why comparing the same topic may be useful?

If you are looking at a single topic and would like to know how the search interest has changed over time, it might be worth using the filters option and setting different time frames to compare it to the same topic.

Although you may decide to just set a longer time frame to look at how the search volume has changed over time and annotate the different events that triggered these spikes, believe me, the tool paints a whole different picture if you make a comparison.

Here is a quick example.

The search interest for the topic ‘Formula 1’ for 2021 and 2022:

The search interest for the topic ‘Formula 1’ for 2021 and 2022, but presented as a comparison to make it easier to analyse the differences:

Different locations tell a different story?

Comparing what topic is more searched for depending on different locations can offer an interesting angle on geographical trends. Although it is a close draw, Harry Styles seems to be more popular in Scotland than Ed Sheeran.

Comparing the same topic, again?

Similarly to what we did with the topic ‘Formula 1’ and compared the search interest over time, you can use filters to compare the search interest in different locations over the same period.

And now that you are an expert in using Trends data, let’s get to the most exciting part – visualisations!

How to visualise Google Trends data?

Let’s make a line chart race in a few easy steps:

1. Export the data from Google Trends and open it in Excel or Google Sheets. Clean the data if needed.
2. Upload the data to a visualisation tool of your choice. I’ve used Flourish for this tutorial. Reformat the data if needed, as shown in the video below.
3. Improve the layout of your line chart using the settings.

Here is what the finished product looks like. I’ve used different newspapers and types of journalism for this example, and there haven’t been any unexpected turns taking place. A good suggestion, though, is to look at the search popularity of controversial people or topics.

How about making a map?

1. Export the data and find the maximum value by country using the formula =max(B2:D2) (or change it to work with your cell numbers).
2. Find what search topic matches the maximum value using the formula =index($B$1:$F$1,match(E2,B2:D2,0)) (or change it to work with your cell numbers).
3. Upload the data to a visualisation tool of your choice and improve it using the settings.

Before doing all of that, ask yourself whether a map is the best way to visualise the type of data you are looking at.

Here is an example of why a bar chart might be more appropriate in some cases. I looked at which countries searched for “gpt-4” the most in the last 24 hours. In this case making use of the spatial dimension might confuse readers and doesn’t clearly communicate the message (apart from the obvious heavy concentration of search in China).

💡A more effective suggestion:

If you made it to this part – congrats 🎉 you are now fully equipped to start searching for data on Trends, filtering it and visualising it! Share your visualisations with us on social media by tagging @Interhacktives.