| melunernto's Forum Info |
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| Additional Info About melunernto |
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What Google Trends Teaches Us About When To Trust Data
It is really easy for people to trust data. Perhaps too easy. A 2018 Stanford University study showed people are 70% more likely to trust statements with a number in it than one without. Even more alarming, nearly 60% of participants believed a fake headline that contained a statistic vs. only 40% who believed the same headline without the statistic. And here is the real kicker: None of that last two paragraphs, save for the first two sentences, were true. There was no Stanford study that I know of, and I made up those numbers. That hyperlink is actually a link to the infamous 1982 “band on the field” Cal/Stanford game. While I’m not that sorry for tricking you, it illustrates the point: Numbers (and people) can definitely misrepresent the truth. In the content marketing world, we see a lot of misleading numbers attempting to build trust with audiences. Even scarier, a lot of content producers don’t even realize they are doing it. Not sure what I mean? I will show you with my favorite example: Google Trends. Three Basic Rules for (Honest) Data Analysis If you are unfamiliar, Google Trends is an incredible tool that allows you to look up the relative search volume of anything. For instance, I wanted to know when “Old Town Road” started ruining my life, so I pulled up a chart of interest over the last year. Pretty intuitive, right? According to this chart, the hit reached fever pitch around mid-April 2019. For context, the Billy Ray Cyrus Remix was released on April 5, 2019, so Trends checks out. Now, you can probably start seeing why this is a huge tool for content marketers. It provides free, highly customizable, and authoritative data, and people believe it because it comes from Google. But let’s look more closely at the information we got back. You may notice something unique about the Y-axis, which brings us to the first rule. #1. Don’t Compare Apples to Oranges In every Trends chart, 100 represents the max search volume on the chart; in this case, it is the day when “Old Town Road” was searched for the most. This is the case in this chart and every Trends chart because every chart will, at some point have its highest point. Every other value on the chart is relative to that 100 value. In other words, every number along the line is a percentage of the term at its peak. So, as the number hovers around 50 at the end of the chart, we can assume that at the last day in the range, it was searched for roughly half as much as it was at its peak. https://new.allinclusive.agency/search-engine-optimization-service |
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