correlation: the degree to which two or more attributes or measurements on the same group of elements show a tendency to vary together – dictionary.com

Part of your digital marketing strategy is keyword research, or should be. You can use free tools like Google Trends to type in search terms or phrases to see their popularity plotted over time and by region. For instance, entering the word “greeting card” shows an overall downward trend in search volume since 2004 but also reveals the spike in search volume around holidays like Christmas.

Tip: Make sure you are logged out of your own Google account to not skew the results.

Google also offers another tool to further refine your ad buys and content editorial calendar in the form of Google Correlate (a seperate component of Trends). Instead of showing the popularity of a search term, correlate shows you other search criteria that mirrors or is associated to the original term. Our previous greeting card example provides shows the a lot of similar search terms you would expect but also a few unexpected. The term greeting card also correlated to precious moment, jazz cd, trivia, fountain pens, and elizabeth arden(?).

Considering trend and correlation data, a campaign two months ahead of the holiday season for “capturing the precious moments of the season with our new voice recording greeting cards” geo-targeted to Hawaii might do well.

What would you do with these results for social media, direct mail, and qr code?

To learn more about Google Correlate, check out their easy-to-understand comic or the white paper for full details.