Sunday, May 1, 2011

Using Google Trends To Look At The Flooring Industry

Now that we have completed one third of 2011 I thought I would look at the trends in certain flooring industry categories again to see how things look compared to previous years. Although some things seem pretty obvious I wanted to confirm my suspicions based on conversations I had with many different flooring customers.

I like to use Google Trends because it gives us a pretty accurate picture based on searches done on Google. I will start with a couple of trend tests to demonstrate Google Trends is fairly accurate and believable. First one is based on a recent fad which is women putting feathers in their hair. This really took off late 2010 and is going crazy in salons right now across the USA. (I know this because I have a client who sells a boat load of feathers each month.) So let's see how it looks using Google Trends..

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The second test is the "Super Bowl", which should peek for a very short time span and does...

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We can see the Google Trends are fairly accurate. So lets see how Walmart and Amazon are doing over time. Notice the high peeks every year during the holiday shopping season.
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So now lets look at some search trends for specific flooring categories from 2004 to present and only for the USA.
1. Carpet..


2. Hardwood flooring...

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3. Laminate flooring...

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4. Flooring...

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I heard from many store owners that 2010 started out fairly strong and then died the second half of 2010. The Google search trends for 2010 seems to pain the same picture.

5. Shaw Carpet, Mohawk Carpet and STAINMASTER

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6. Compare "Carpet One", Flooring America" "Mohawk Flooring" and "Shaw Flooring"..

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7. SmartStrand (Notice the huge spike in searches during zoo animal promotions

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Google Trends seems to say the amount of interest and noise being made online about flooring is steadily declining. If we looked at from State to State I am sure we would see some area trends doing much better than others.
Posted by Unknown at 8:37 PM

2 comments:

  1. Dave SpreenMay 3, 2011 at 12:50 PM

    Interesting analysis tool John. I'm guessing other segments of the construction/home industries show similar trends.

    Besides the downturn, could the trend line be amplified by the increase in the use of social media - is there a way to extract similar graphs for searches on Facebook for example? Be interesting to see if those showed an increase over the same period.

    Dave Spreen

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  2. UnknownMay 3, 2011 at 6:54 PM

    Hi Dave,

    Since flooring isn't something people are really passionate about I don't believe it would look any different. Most consumers don't really care about following flooring on social media channels unless they are in the market for a new floor. Even flooring businesses don't embrace the social media channels on a regular basis.

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