Hundreds of millions of people around the globe love and watch the show. Game of Thrones needs no introduction. As the two-year wait ended on Sunday, the show is back on with the last season ever. I did a little bit of experiment to see how popular it is on search engine.
Since I use Google Trends as the tool in this experiment, it’s good to revisit what Google Trends is. I’ll let one of their own explain it
Trends data is an unbiased sample of our Google search data. It’s anonymized (no one is personally identified), categorized (determining the topic for a search query) and aggregated (grouped together). This allows us to measure interest in a particular topic across search, from around the globe, right down to city-level geography.
You can do it, too — the free data explorer on Google Trends allows you to search for a particular topic on Google or a specific set of search terms. Use the tool and you can see search interest in a topic or search term over time, where it’s most-searched, or what else people search for in connection with it.
Source: Google News Lab
To display different levels of online interest, Google uses a scale of zero to 100 for the index. Here is how Google defines the metric:
Numbers represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region and time. A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term. A value of 50 means that the term is half as popular. A score of 0 means there was not enough data for this term.
So what is the difference between this season and last seasons in terms of online interest? Below is the chart I took last Saturday with the “Game of Thrones” keyword. The spike in 2017 was during the premiere of season 7.
Here is what the chart looks like at the moment. Same market, same time frame, only a few days apart
The previous spike in 2017, as shown in the screenshot above, looks like Arya next to the Mountain, which is the expected spike this week. Data from Google predicts that folks will search on and talk about the show a whole lot this week.
While the data clearly shows an increase in online interest, it’s only an index and there is no telling on how many searches this season garnered compared to the previous seasons. Plus, it’s not clear on what contributes to the spike. Is it because of the household name Game of Thrones already possesses? Is it because of the wait? Is it because of the finality of the show? Or is it because of the strongest marketing push I have seen from HBO?
I find it a very interesting phenomenon. A show like GoT has been aggressively advertised. Magazine covers, interviews on TV shows, newspapers articles, behind-the-scene clips, several trailers, a viral tactic to place the full-sized thrones in undisclosed locations around the world, a red carpet in New York, you name it. If anybody says that brands such as GoT don’t need marketing, show them what has been done in the past few weeks. They are not dumb and they don’t throw money at unnecessary tasks. But at the same time, I wonder how the marketers can analyze and objectively pinpoint whether the marketing actually works for a show like GoT.
Minh Quang Duong 