Which US states should your ads target? Google Trends interest by region in Python
I built this actor; it's a paid tool on Apify with a free trial credit. Most Google Trends tutorials stop at the interest-over-time line. The part I find more useful for actual decisions is interest by region : where in the country people search for one thing more than another. If you're splitting an ad budget across states, or picking which city gets a launch first, that's the table you want.…
This article demonstrates how to utilize Google Trends data to identify the most promising U.S. states for advertising based on search interests. The author developed a Python tool that scrapes Google Trends data and provides a ranked list of states with a score ranging from 0 to 100, where 100 represents the highest percentage of searches for a given term in that state.
The tool can analyze either a single keyword or a comparison between up to five keywords. The author used the keywords "iPhone" and "Samsung Galaxy" to show how search interests differ between these two products. The results showed that Wyoming has the highest share of searches for both "iPhone" (82%) and "Samsung Galaxy" (18%), while states such as New York and District of Columbia follow closely with 92% and 8% respectively.
The article also presents a comparative analysis of iPhone versus Samsung Galaxy search interests across different states, with the state split revealing where Samsung performs relatively better. For instance, in Wyoming, Samsung has 82% of the search interest compared to 18% for iPhone, while in Louisiana, Samsung has 97% of the search interest compared to 3% for iPhone.
The author emphasizes that these figures are real and come from the Google Trends data, with all 51 regions being returned in a single result. The Python code provided at the end of the article allows users to easily retrieve regional data and create a CSV file containing the state, code, keyword, and share percentages.
Additionally, the author suggests that users can further refine their search by setting the region resolution to DMA (Designated Market Area) or CITY, depending on whether they want to analyze TV ad buys or smaller keyword volumes, respectively. This allows for a more targeted approach to ad placement, ultimately optimizing ad spend and improving results.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
