I just discovered Google’s Consumer Barometer and I can’t believe I haven’t heard of it until now.
It basically allows you to visualise various data sets to learn more about consumer behaviour. Variables are divided into Topics, Products, Countries and Audience. Under these you can then select from:
Topics
- Purchase Behaviour
- Research Behaviour
- Research & Purchase Behaviour
- Device Usage
- Internet Usage
- Consumer Attitudes
Products
- Automotive
- Finance & Real Estate
- Groceries & Healthcare
- Media & Entertainment
- Retail
- Technology
- Travel
Countries
First separated into Continents then into countries.
Audience
- Gender
- Age
- Education
- Internet Usage
In this visualisation you can see what percentage of UK consumers purchase their car insurance online.
In this I can see the percentage of people in the UK that purchase cinema tickets online on the left and on the right I can see the percentage that research films online before purchasing tickets.
Here I can see device usage across UK consumers
Finally, here I can see on the far left the percentage of UK consumers that purchased a package holiday online, followed by the percentage that did research online before purchasing offline and on the right I can see this data for the USA.
The data was collated between January and May 2012 so is slightly out of date now however I would hope that this is updated sometime in the near future as it is certainly useful. You can find out more about the collection of the data here.
There are many uses for the data from using the country/product fields to plan new countries for expansion, using the research & purchase fields with products to see whether a content strategy would benefit i.e. if a high percentage of consumers do research online before purchasing the chances are this would be beneficial.
Also, in the browse section you can see the role that search engines play in the purchase process, this visualisation shows me the percentage of UK consumers that used a search engine when purchasing various products & services. By hovering over the percentage I can see which product it relates to.
This just further makes the case for why a solid SEO & Content Marketing strategy is needed.