Google Trends vs. Talkwalker by Hootsuite

Google Trends is great for research and planning, to analyse keyword demand and associated costs. It really does help plan to capture consumer demand. It can be a little tricky to use, as the UX design isn't brilliant, so you'll need to learn how to navigate the website.

Incentivized

Talkwalker is well suited for big companies and agencies that are looking for a long-term solution to keep track of the industry and/or their brands and key competitors. While setup requires a bit of dedication (especially in terms of custom filters and tags), once it's done, the tool will give the user a lot of flexibility to analyze the conversations and find the relevant results that answer the business questions. Companies just looking for a tool to track a short time period, or simple things like Twitter hashtags, won't take advantage of the full capabilities of this tool. Therefore, they could feel frustrated when comparing the outcomes/usage versus the costs.

Incentivized

• I love how Google Trends presents the popularity of a specific query by location. For example, my product may be more popular or more "searched" in a specific state or city. This helps a lot for direct mail campaigns or any sort of in-person marketing efforts like events or pop-ups. You could use the information from Google Trends to decide what locations will be more receptive of your product/industry or you could see where people have little to no interest and build a brand awareness campaign focusing on those areas.
• Another great feature within Google Trends is that it shows "Related Queries", which are basically suggestions of better keywords or phrases to incorporate into your content. If you search for data on a keyword you're using that's too broad (your content won't stand out among other web pages) or too narrow (not many potential customers are searching that keyword or phrase), Google Trends will suggest a related keyword or phrase that is more appropriate or trending at the moment. You could go back and incorporate these phrases into your content so that it's more likely to be found on search engines.
• Within the Google Trends "Related Topics" section, you can choose whether you want to see topics that are "Top" or "Rising". I like this feature because looking at a "Rising" topic can help you create content that's more likely to be seen - especially if you're a beginner. Most topics that are in the "Top" category can have thousands of web pages that you're competing against and you can feel like your content is drowning. But the topics in the "rising" category can be great for newer sites that haven't developed authority online yet. You can write on one of these topics and be one of the first sites to create content on that topic, which gives you a head start over other sites.
• Google Trends "Categories" is also a great feature. If you don't have any content ideas for your website, you can easily find inspiration by selecting a category that's relevant to your industry. The top keywords or topics will come up and you can create content on those topics to increase your number of web visitors. For example, if you work in the fashion industry and you don't have content ideas, you can have Google Trends generate data for the "Beauty & Fitness" or "Shopping" categories to see what's trending. Google will tell you if a specific brand, person, or event is trending and you could write an article based on one of those trends. Since people are searching for that topic, your content will be seen. This is a great way to create timely content even if you're new to an industry or simply haven't kept up with it.

Incentivized

• Truly global listening platform - monitor a deep range of media types from all over the world. Particularly strong in supporting competitive monitoring and analysis briefs across regions and countries. It monitors content in original language which I believe is a very strong monitoring factor.
• Easy to use yet powerful dashboard visualisations - the dashboard interface is among the best I have seen. While it can accomplish many things, and under the hood is a very powerful and complex tool, the user interface is very intuitive, slick, quick and packed with all the KPIs you could want.
• Customisation of the tool is a great feature. You can build your own dashboard and reporting spaces to suit your needs. You can schedule alerts from the system in a variety of outputs to keep you up to date with the latest events.
• Customer support & technological advancement - the team at Talkwalker are highly proficient, always willing to support our every need, however big or small. Talkwalker aim to release around 4 software updates each year which means the platform is always full of the latest data visualisations and monitoring technologies
• Having 'traditional' media monitored alongside social as well as owned media assets in one dashboard space is invaluable to help brands understand where their media footprint lies and how they perform in each media set, relative to the others.
• AI - Talkwalker has introduced greater AI capabilities recently which means the capability of the tool in monitoring is ever-increasing, and the accuracy of targeting content and sentiment analysis is improving. The Visual Insights and image recognition technology is a really strong feature, and a very welcome addition to the monitoring aspect

Incentivized

• It would be nice to have breadcrumbs available so that I can go backward in a particular search. One I click a topic and then click the related terms two or three times, I find that I'm so far down the rabbit hole that the "Back" button in my browser is a really inconvenient way to find my way back to a certain stage of my search. If there were breadcrumbs I could jump directly back to a particular stage and chase another rabbit from there.
• It's easy to get lost searching in here for an extended period of time. I would be nice to be able to print a report of my whole session when I have finished.
• It would be nice to have a Top Tends board of job searches or other information related to jobs that are currently popular Google searches.

Incentivized

• The system is complicated. With everything that you're able to do, it does come at the cost of simplicity. It definitely requires training and a high level of expertise to properly leverage what it can do.
• The system can be slow. If you "ask" it to do too many things at once, it can get hung up and do the spin of doom.

Incentivized

Love it! In most cases, Talkwalker is a no-brainer: I can confidently recommend it to clients.

Google Trends is very easy to use. you just search for a certain keyword or phrase, and it tells you how often that keyword or phrase is searched, where in the world it is searched, and over the last decade, how often it is per year.

Incentivized

Despite all the functionalities available on the platform, I never felt overwhelmed or confused

Talkwalker gets the job done at a basic level. It performs regular indexing of existing webpages and tracks the instances in which a particular brand or company is mentioned. Especially for being free, this is an awesome resource. However, it should be said that this product does not perform nearly at the level of the paid options.

Incentivized

I haven't needed to use any support for Google Trends. However, I've used Google's support in general and it's a hit or miss. Usually, there's a long wait or they don't understand my problem. They are the only ones that can help, so sometimes I feel stuck. They prioritize paying customers for sure.

Incentivized

They are very helpful, but can sometimes be a little too quick and not explain things in as great a depth as we would like. They have great staff and programs, and we don't really have any other major complaints. Support is very responsive and helpful when need be.

Incentivized

Google Trends is a great place to start in the content curation, content research, blog post writing, and resource page creation process. It is not, however, a place to do serious SEO optimization. Tools like Moz, or Analytics SEO would be a better place to go after you do initial research on Google Trends to dial in your keywords, and optimize content for search engines.

Incentivized

I have yet to find another tool that would provide me with such a detailed information per query. It's such a find! Plus, I get separate emails per a search query and I'm able to archive those emails to the appropriate folders and always have a way of looking back. It's very useful for building monthly reports.

Incentivized

• Google Trends has shown me when a keyword is no longer working for my website so that I can adjust the content accordingly.
• It shows me seasonal differences so I can adjust my PPC budgets to be on pace with the trends.

Incentivized

• The free tool is a no-brainer. It absolutely helps ferret out mentions on social media that I wasn't aware of before.
• Now, I can use the tool for clients, too, so for consultants, it can be a great way to help stay on top of what's being said about them online, as well.
• Using the paid version would help delve into even more insights for your business.

Incentivized