Today’s Breakfast Briefing, held at Google’s HQ on Barrow St in Dublin, and covered the topic of “Data to Insight”.  To set the scene, the presenter offered a very succinct quote on the difference between data and insight, from Niall Fitzgerald, former chairman of Unilever:

“Data makes your briefcase heavy – insights make you rich”.

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The presentation focussed on the tools available from Google (most of them free!) to help users better understand how their customers use the internet to search and how their brands stack up in those search results versus their completion.

With so much data out there (and Google worldwide collects an enormous amount of worthwhile data), it is important to think about what you want to find out from the data before you jump into an overwhelming mass of information and get hopelessly lost.

Five golden rules to remember

  1. Data is not insight. Insight is Insight. Ask yourself “so what” – which data is relevant to me.
  2. Always start with a hypnotises. Set out to prove or disprove it
  3. Don’t reinvent the wheel – check if Google has already done the work
  4. Even if you find nothing, you’ve found something.
  5. Keep your finger on the pulse – the world and it’s consumers are changing rapidly.

 

The free data and insight tools available from Google will most likely contain data particularly relevant to your own individual business. There is also a wealth of Irish only data. The tools available from Google are:

Think With Google:  contains ready-made insights.  https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/

Consumer Barometer:  help to understand how people use the internet. https://www.consumerbarometer.com/en/

Google Trends:  easy to use tools to track trends in searches over time. https://trends.google.ie/trends/

Google Zeitgeist: see what the hot topics were for the past year and earlier.  https://trends.google.com/trends/yis/2016/GLOBAL

YouTube Trends dashboard:   https://www.youtube.com/feed/trending

 

Pay Per Click Ireland can help with finding your way through the various data source. Call or email us today.

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