Where are web analytics searches coming from?

Google’s Insights for Search is a really neat tool for understanding the regional interest of search terms trended over time. In the last week, bloggers have been playing around with the tool to get a reading of the popularity distribution of the major social networks (see here, for instance).

I started playing around with it a little bit and found some interesting data about the geographic distribution of keywords related to our industry. To understand the charts below better, consider that Google’s search volume index is their proprietary measurement of a search term’s regional interest. I looked at the US for this exercise, and I started the ticker running at January 2007.

Here’s what I found:

Search term = “Web Analytics”

The regional searching interest for web analytics was pretty well distributed across the US, with a slight bias towards the West Coast and equally strong interest in New York. The preponderant state in terms of searches for web analytics is Utah, the home state of a certain large clickstream vendor. Hmmm.

Search term = “Voice of the customer”

Unlike the search term web analytics, voice of the customer seems to be a term in use only among the most technologically savvy.

Search term = “Customer satisfaction”

Happily, the value of satisfying customers seems to have obtained a healthy level of traction across the country, with notable strengths in Wisconsin, Indiana, Georgia, Maryland, and Massachusetts.

Search term = “Satisfaction surveys”

But interest in satisfaction surveys doesn’t enjoy the same equitable distribution, and is largely confined to the east and west coasts, with pockets of strength in the Midwest. There’s a giant hole in the center of the country: people are clearly interested in customer satisfaction here, but they are perhaps not taking the necessary steps to measure and thus operationalize it.

This is just a taste, and one could easily think up a dozen other search terms of interest. My little study is far from exhaustive, but it’s interesting and eye-opening data nonetheless.