This month I wanted to share some insight into search cycles and the way you can apply lessons learnt from historical search trends to forecast future demand. In particular I wanted to focus on the changes in search behaviours around product life cycles. In this case I have chosen the phenomenally popular Apple iPad as an example.

You can see from the graph below the defined search peaks for the iPad across time. There are big spikes in search activity in the run up to the launch of each iteration of the iPad and also around Christmas time when people want to buy the product as a gift. (more…)