Big Data Helps Advertise, Books?

Wouldn’t it be great if consumers told us exactly when they’d be looking for our products? We could send them an advertisement perfectly timed with their interest. The chagrin of many publishers is that consumers don’t tell us when they shelve a book and begin the hunt for the next.  Sure, we can look at sales data to show when a book is purchased but that doesn’t tell us when the journey of discovering the book began. What if I told you readers are confiding in someone for recommendations and that someone is Google?

Google is tracking users’ search data at a level that makes it the quintessential example of Big Data. Google Trends allows anyone with an internet connection to then look at that data to discover when people are interested in a gargantuan array of topics. Let’s take a look at a few high level examples of how it can be used in the publishing industry. 

We’ll start off by trying to answer, hopefully confirming what your sales data mentioned earlier shows, what times of the year are people buying books? If we look at people’s searches for a bookstore over the last year it gives this graph. 

The peak times people are looking for bookstores coincide with the fall and spring school semesters starting. The related search terms are primarily names of campus bookstores so we might say students don’t just procrastinate homework but buying course books too. The other peaks in the data are leading up to December 25th and the beginning of school’s summer break. If you’re thinking, “obviously books are the best Christmas present, tell me something I don’t know,” let’s look at some weightier insights data analytics can give us.

When looking at people’s searches for multiple terms, a more intricate and relevant graph takes shape. Looking at book discussion club, bookstore, best book, non-fiction, and fiction over the last week gives this graph.

We discover new insights about people looking for bookstores simply changing our data timeframe. People are looking for bookstores in the late morning and early afternoon peaking on the weekend. This may indicate the best time for a store to catch consumer’s interest is around lunchtime. People aren’t necessarily looking for books at the same time though. The peaks for fiction, nonfiction, and the best book are late at night, mostly around midnight. There appears to be a pattern of people looking for books at night and then the stores to physically buy them during the day. Unlike bookstores, the trend of people looking for e-books follows their search for the books, possibly because they can buy them instantly once found. Looking at a few genre searches we see they follow the topics of fiction and nonfiction as a whole. The data suggests the best time to advertise a book, to already interested consumers, is at night.

You know your business, consumers, and product better than anyone. I’ve demonstrated a minuscule amount of the application big data and analytics has for the publishing industry and book sales. You can be the analytics guru who discovers the trends related to your business needs. If you’re publishing a book with stories of courage in adversity, you can find the intersecting trends showing when people are looking to be encouraged and for books! If it’s on presidents, travel, parenting, or any topic you can look at the trends to discover when consumers are already interested.

Happy analyzing.

by Dexter Nordhues