One weekend separates you from Halloween; so instead of aimlessly wandering through the costume store an hour before your party, head over to Frightgeist from Google Trends to get some ideas! The site uses search trends from the past year to determine the most searched for costumes. According to the National Retail Federation, 35% of consumers will turn to search engines to find a costume this year. So instead of turning Google to search “Best Halloween Costumes 2017”, head to the site to discover the most searched for costumes across the country.
According to the site, the top 5 costumes nationally are:
- Wonder Woman
- Harley Quinn
- Clown
- Unicorn
- Rabbit
You can also let the site use your location to see the top costumes locally if you want to make sure you don’t show up in the same costume as everyone else. What’s even cooler? They have a “Costume Wizard” that lets you set spookiness and uniqueness levels to find that perfect costume.
So what does this mean for marketers? With only a few days until Halloween, it may be too late to capitalize on these trends in the world of e-commerce, but Google Trends is a great tool for keyword research. For example, let’s say I run an online popcorn shop and I want to see when the best time of year to sell caramel corn might be. I can type “caramel corn” into the search bar and see the trend over multiple years.
In the last 5 years, we can see obvious spikes around Christmas, but there is also a smaller increase in interest around Halloween. As a manager of my AdWords campaign, this gives me great insight on when I should be pushing my ads the most.