The Hired Guns Blog

At Google, some very bright engineers are working tirelessly to make sure everything you do all day somehow involves one of their products. It’s a little bit scary. Fortunately, lots of Google’s valuable tools are available for free, to help anybody learn from the vast volumes of data the company collects. So if you’re working on an online marketing campaign, building a blog, or just maintaining your personal website, you should put Google to work for you.

As someone who writes a blog about copywriting, I find Google beyond helpful in tracking how people use language. Here’s a list of my eight favorite Google bookmarks, going from serious and pragmatic on to fun and frivolous.

Google Analytics

Thanks to its longevity, reliability, and unbeatable price (free), Google Analytics is the standard way that many of us measure website traffic. It takes some technical aptitude to set it up, but when you get it humming, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.

Google Webmaster Tools

This is Google’s way of showing you how its search engine analyzes and crawls your site. Again, it takes a little bit of technical work to set it up. But if you’re trying to attract search engine traffic, it’s worth your time to understand Google Webmaster Tools.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool

Adwords, Google’s real-time advertising auction service, is how the company makes most of its money, and this is your portal to all the knowledge it collects. Enter a few words and Google will tell you how popular those terms are and also suggest similar phrases in demand by advertisers. Obviously this is most helpful if you buy ads, or if you run other companies’ ads on your own site. But it’s also fun to see what phrases people search for. Type in “love” and you’ll see that a lot of people are looking for “love quotes,” “love songs,” and “love poems.”

Google Trends

Most people use Google Trends as a fast way to check what’s popular online at any given moment. But it’s also a window into historical trends. You can enter search terms and see patterns graphed over time. For example, enter “Yankees” and notice the spikes in interest each year the team made the World Series.

Google Insights for Search

Think of this as a more sophisticated version of Google Trends. Insights lets you research search terms by geographic location and time. Type in “sunscreen” for the United States and you’ll see that its popularity spikes every summer—and that it has the highest regional interest in Hawaii.

Google News Archive Search

If you’ve ever wanted to bring out your secret etymologist, the Google News Archive is your ticket. It lets you research the dates at which words and phrases first emerged in the media. Type “ringtone” and see how the word rose in popularity from 2000 until 2007—and how it’s been on the decline ever since.

The Google Books NGram viewer

Google has scanned millions of books, and you can search their data to see trends in language over time. For example, search for “gin, vodka, rum” and check out the graph that mirrors the relative popularity of those drinks over the last 200 years.

Google Correlate

If you’ve mastered Trends and Insights, here’s where you kick things up a notch. Use the “compare time series” function to enter a search word and find other words that have risen and fallen in popularity around the same time. (Did you know “strawberry” correlates perfectly to “summer styles?”) Under the “Compare US States” feature, you can discover that the word “hoagie” is popular in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware; it also correlates closely to Philadelphia-related terms like “Flyers” and “Phillies.”

Finally, if you really want to blow your mind, click “search by drawing.” Then use your mouse to draw a graph (this represents search popularity over time). Google will try to find words that match your line. I drew a graph that stayed in a straight line for a few years and then fell off a cliff in 2008. The word Google found that most closely matched it? Altavista—that old search engine that nobody uses any more. Wonder how that happened.