If you haven’t explored it before, I highly recommend going over to google.com/trends and playing around with their trending tools. Its a lot of fun to see what everyone is searching throughout the years. Then again, I’m a math major and a love sorting through data and finding interesting correlations. Here are some of the graphs I thought were interesting as they pertain to cider.
Worldwide Search for “Cider”
Its interesting to see the seasonality of the searches. The continual peaks you see are in the month of October. This makes sense that people are searching for cider in the fall, but its fun to see it laid out here. The letters show where prominent news outlets ran articles with the search term. There is a higher concentration of those more recently.
Worldwide Search for “Hard Cider”
There seems to be more of a seasonal discrepancy for hard cider than there was for the singular cider term.
US Search for “Woodchuck Cider”
This one is interesting. Woodchuck cider seemed to have hit their biggest search traffic in October of 2011. The term has been steadily declining since October 2012. Could this be that there are now more ciders on the market and consumers have more choice? It’s interesting that the steady decline starts October 2012, because that is the time it was announced that Irish company C&C was purchasing the Vermont Hard Cider Company which made woodchuck.
Worldwide Search for “Magners” vs “Woodchuck Cider”
Magners Cider is C&C’s flagship cider internationally, domestically (in the UK) it is labeled “Bulmers.” Woodchuck had been killing it in the search until 2012. Correlating with the purchase?
Worldwide Search for “Angry Orchard” vs “Woodchuck Cider”
It looks as though Boston Beer Company’s introduction of their Angry Orchard cider line really took off in the search terms. Perhaps this has stolen some of woodchuck’s traffic.
Big vs Small
Its sad to compare any of these big-beer cider companies with the smaller craft cider brands. The traffic just doesn’t compare. Goes to show, it helps to have big marketing budgets to build awareness. In my book (or, more accurately, blog) however, good product trumps good marketing.
These are only a few of my searches in my exploration of google trends. Feel free to do your own, and let me know what interesting results come of it!
