The obvious answer for this is that search volume does not predict success; what determines success is your ability to grab as big a share of the qualified volume of those search queries that you can.

However, just for fun – I thought I’d head over to Google Trends and take a look at the search volume over the last 30 days for the top 4 grossing movies for this weekend, and see if there was any correlation.

As you can see, this clearly shows that “Vantage Point”, which has been out for 2 weeks had a huge jump in searches last weekend, when it actually was the no.1 movie in the US. “The Other Boleyn Girl”, in it’s first week of release is not far behind, with a fair drop off down to new release, “Semi Pro.”  This was followed by 3 week old “The Spiderwick Chronicles”, which does not seem to have had much of a jump in volume over that period.

Looking at the news references for these 4 movies, “Semi-Pro” doesn’t even register, so there doesn’t appear to be much behind it.

So, now that we’ve seen the search volume, let’s take a look at the estimated grosses for this weekend…

Whoops… that doesn’t look like the order of the search volume shown in Google Trends.

So, it looks like the lesson from this is that you shouldn’t base your assumptions on one set of data, or assume that just because Google says something it auto-magically makes it so.

Just remember this, the next time you see someone posting election search data to prove who the winner will be…

Filed under: Analytics, SEO on Monday, March 3rd, 2008 by Simon Heseltine | No Comments
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