During most of the year, web analytics focused on the food industry - including dining, cooking and grocery shopping - reveal fairly stable trends that tend to occur over long periods of time.
Thanksgiving season in the US, however, is a clear exception.
During this unique period, marketers have the once-a-year opportunity to use the web as a barometer for Americans' food tastes, as well as their eating and cooking habits. They can also see the extent to which consumers are turning online and using technology to search for holiday-related information.
While not all the information that current analytics programs uncover is revelatory, the volume and sophistication of data that can be collected is steadily improving and, with each successive upgrade and new tool, can provide valuable insights which, when paired with other metrics data, can show a clearer shapshot of changing - and unchanging - consumer tastes.
Same Old Same Old
For instance, Google Trends, which has been tracking searches for the word "turkey" for the last five years, regularly shows a massive jolt in searches for the word each year around Thanksgiving. A smaller spike also occurs around Christmastime. Nothing new there.
Similarly, it comes as no surprise that the usual suspects take center stage on the Thanksgiving dinner table, according to pre-Thankgiving grocery product search data compiled by MyWebGrocer.com (via MarketingCharts). In that analysis, Turkey topped the list of most sought-after grocery items in November, beating out the typical monthly leader, milk, by 74%. Searches for turkey increased 569% compared with October, the firm said.
New Insights
However, as recipe sites become more trafficked - and sophisticated in their analytics - they reveal interesting tidbits and nuances about their users (via the New York Times). For instance, cooks in the southeast rarely need to look up pie-crust recipes. And the search for cheese-ball recipes in the Midwest never seems to subside, despite a seemingly inherent homegrown knowledge base there.
North Carolinians, in another search-analytics insight, appear to like sweet potatoes more than any other state in the country. And, based on the number of Thanksgiving-related searches from Panama, US expatriates do not cease celebrating Thanksgiving just because they're not on American soil.
Though the information is not infinite or all-knowing and can't explain why there are so many searches for sweet potatoes from North Carolina, for instance, it is getting better each year.
"When you marketed in the past, you had to guess at the consumer’s motivation," said Kevin Kells, head of consumer packaged goods for Google (via the New York Times). "Now you have the answers to that right in front of you."
