Focus on products: Using Google Tools to choose products

You’ve decided to set up an online store, so it’s time to decide exactly what to sell. The market you to head into will influence your choices when it comes to design, branding, marketing and target audience. So it’s important to find the right one for you.

This involves finding a product line that will sell. You want your popular products to capture the imagination of as many shoppers as possible and make your shop a huge success.

In this article we will show you:

• How to use Google Keyword tool to find popular products
• How to use Google’s tools to see where your products will sell best
• Where you can find out if a product is a trend on the up or on the wane

Using Google Keyword tool

To gain access to the full keyword tool you need to sign up for Google AdWords. You may want to use the service down the line to market your site but for now you just want to sign up to use the free search tool.

Once in AdWords home you need to click the Tool and Analysis tab. The dashboard you will arrive at looks like this:

Now you want to test and see if your product ideas are being searched for online and which of them is more popular. It’s easy to use, simple type in your product word and press search. This will bring up the global monthly searches for this word as well as the local monthly searches. It gives you the competition rating for the word and all other terms used that are related.

You can create a stronger filter for your search and see where this word is getting the most searches, how much the word is getting searched on mobile devices as well as desktops etc.

Use this tool to work out which of your potential products is being searched for the most. This will give you an idea of the size of the market.

Using Google Trends

Finding products which are becoming increasingly popular is a good idea. This means that not only is there a market for your products but it is growing. If there is a big market for a product but it is rapidly shrinking, you might want to rethink your plan.

One way to analyse this is using Google Trends. For this tool you don’t need to be signed into your account and again – it is free to use.

Go to the Google Trends website Here you can browse the hottest search trends of the moment in Hot Searches and you can browse the Top Charts. For example looking at these I find out that Pizza is the most searched for Food and Coffee is the most searched for Drink. However, you really want to be specific.

There is a search field on the left hand side which you can put your product name into and watch the search trend.

Here you can see that I have put Aeropress Coffee – a type of home coffee maker into the search field. The blue line has shown a steady increase in searches since 2006. It peaked in December 2012 but by clicking forecast at the top of the graph, I can see (in the dotted blue lines) that Google expects another spike this winter, albeit a smaller one.

Further down the page I can see on a map of the world, where the interest in the Aeropress has been. As you can see it is mainly in North America, the UK and Australia.

By using these tools, you can establish which products you think have the best local market for you.