As a paid search marketer, I am always tweaking and always looking for a new avenue to push my campaigns. One new method I have found is using Google Trends. If you aren’t familiar with Google Trends, it is a list of the most searched terms on Google on the current day. The top terms of the day are labeled Volcanic, On Fire and Spicy and are ranked from 1 to 100. Each term will have a daily time frame showing when during the day the most searches are occurring, a list of related terms, search results, any new articles and some have a list of where the terms are happening the most.

I have found that I can take advantage of a hot topic by checking the top 15 or so in the morning and seeing if any of the terms make sense for any products I am pushing. For example, A few weeks ago I found that the term “Susan B. Anthony” was Volcanic. I did a search through my product list and found that I had a number of books about Susan B. Anthony available. I quickly created a campaign and was able to push a number of sales through a term that I wouldn’t normally have in my account (my specific industry is a bit different and does not really fit into the mold of having the long, long list of long-tail keywords).

I take a look at the campaign after a few hours and decide to kill it or keep it going. This is 180 degrees from my usual campaign management. I like to run for a week before I tweak, but in this case, I make a quick decision.

There are a few other great search trend tools that I use and will be writing about in the next few weeks.