How to Track and Understand Consumer Trends
Demand Analysis helps you uncover the size, growth, and patterns of consumer trends. It uses granular search data to capture real intent signals from users, giving you a clear view of both macro (broad, industry-level) and micro (niche, detailed) trends.
What is the value of Demand Analysis?
Demand Analysis provides powerful consumer demand insights, helping research teams build out their strategies by looking deeper into macro and micro consumer trends. By understanding actual search demand, you can:
- Spot new opportunities early, before they peak, and before your competitors notice it.
- Measure and compare trend size and growth to decide where to focus between different alternatives
- Prioritize actions: whether launching new products and services, repackaging an existing one, or refining marketing content
- Adapt quickly as trends evolve to stay ahead of competitors
💡 Pro Tip: Trend spotting works best when tracked continuously, not just once
Tip: Demand Analysis insights should complement findings from other research methods like surveys and social listening analysis, but also highlight how quickly consumer preferences and habits change - often outpacing the analysis provided by these alternative methods.
Questions You Can Answer with Demand Analysis
-
Market Size & Growth
- How big is consumer demand in my industry?
- Is demand growing, shrinking, or seasonal?
- Is the market size and growth strong enough to justify investment?
-
Trend Identification
- What trends most impact my business right now?
- What is the next emerging consumer trend?
- Which trends could shape my product or marketing strategy next?
-
Trend Drivers & Spikes
- What is the reason behind a spike in demand?
- How can we accurately forecast seasonal changes in demand?
-
Product & Messaging Decisions
- What new products and offerings should we offer based on these trends?
- How should we position or communicate them to the market?
Watch this webinar to better understand Demand Analysis
Who Can Leverage Demand Analysis
Demand Analysis delivers value across multiple levels — from research specialists to senior decision-makers — helping everyone stay ahead of consumer trends and market shifts.
-
Insights, Research & Strategy Teams
- Research-focused: Investigate and validate consumer trends before they impact your market
- Quantify demand changes, spot emerging opportunities, and detect seasonal cycles.
- Prioritize trends based on size, growth, and potential business impact.
- Share data-backed insights to guide product, marketing, and corporate strategy.
Example: An insights team identified an early wellness trend and influenced product development, securing a first-mover advantage.
-
Strategy, product development and merchandize teams
- Stay on top of macro and micro consumer trends to make informed strategic decisions.
- Use trend data to evaluate where to invest and where to pivot at the business level.
-
Set direction for multiple teams, ensuring product, marketing, and sales are aligned with consumer demand shifts.
Example: A Head of Strategy used Demand Analysis to redirect investment toward a rising market segment before competitors reacted.
-
Strategic SEO Teams
- Track keyword demand evolution to connect consumer interest with traffic potential.
- Build strategic keyword groups that align with merchandising, product, and content strategies.
-
Pair with Similarweb’s SERP insights to see which competitors are winning and where gaps exist, ensuring you track trends from search to clicks, all done in Similarweb.
Example: An SEO lead combined Demand Analysis with SERP data to reclaim traffic from a competitor during peak seasonal demand
-
Marketing Teams
- Track brand search demand for your company and competitors
- Measure campaign impact on consumer interest and awareness
- Identify fast-rising categories and subtopics to target in messaging
-
Combine with competitive share-of-voice metrics to guide campaign planning
Example: A marketing team spotted an unexpected spike in competitor brand searches, uncovered the cause, and launched a counter-campaign to recapture attention
How to use Demand Analysis
The Demand Analysis Tool is found in the Web Intelligence > Market Research > Demand Analysis module. To get started:
Step 1: Type in the trend you want to analyze
- Search Terms – For focused, term-specific analysis (e.g., brand names, product names). Best when you already know the exact terms you want to track.
- AI Topics – For broader exploration. AI-powered, semantic-based clusters reveal related keywords and trends around any seed term. Great for discovering hidden opportunities.
- Topics – Predefined, US-centric categories ideal for quick benchmarking against known market areas.
-
Keyword Lists – Your own or your team’s custom keyword lists. Fully customizable and reusable across Similarweb for consistent analysis.
💡 Pro Tip: Name your keyword lists clearly so you can compare them later.
Now, make the demand analysis more specific
- Select a country
- Select a time frame you want to analyze, including the fresh look of the last 28 days
- Understand the search trend:
- Growing: +5% or more.
- Stagnating: between -5% and +5%.
- Declining: -5% or more.
Step 2: Understand global distribution
See the top countries by volume of search to understand in which countries the demand is growing or declining to further enhance your strategy.
Step 3: Analyze Keywords to understand what is driving the macro trend
- Keyword Trends: Shows which keywords drive the most searches.
- Keyword Trends Summary: Lists volume, share of total, and growth for each keywords - Click “View keywords in list” to edit or review them.
Step 4: Comparing Trends
Comparisons mode in Demand Analysis help you:
- See which topics are leading vs. fading.
- Identify niche opportunities in bigger markets.
- Refine product and content strategies based on growth.
How to Compare
- Set up a Demand Analysis as normal.
- Click the Compare button at the top (up to 5 comparison)
- Better understand the comparison with:
-
Trends Overview — month-by-month volume, spotting seasonality.
-
Trends Quadrant — visual of growing, fading, leading, or emerging topics.
-
Keywords Trend Summary — side-by-side keyword performance.
-
Trends Overview — month-by-month volume, spotting seasonality.
💡 Pro Tip: Growth rate is often more valuable than absolute search volume when spotting early opportunities.
Step 5 - understand the why behind a trend with AI
AI trend Analyzer Agent
The AI Trend Analyzer is your search behavior detective. It works continuously to detect and explain unusual spikes in search demand. Here’s how it works:
- Detects spikes in Search Term volume using Similarweb’s monthly trend data.
- Identifies keywords driving the surge
- Clusters related keywords into meaningful groups
- Searches the web in real-time to correlate spikes with current events, media coverage, or campaigns.
- Surfaces a clear story, combining both the "what" (the spike) and the "why" (its root cause).
Example 1: The Trend Analyzer is able to highlight that a surge in searches for “Vitamin C” may be traced to flu season, or instead tied to a viral product launch by a well known healthcare/beauty brand.
Example 2: The Trend Analyzer can decode the reasons for a spike in searches around “Seed Oils” showing prominent specific queries from a keyword cluster, such as: “Are seed oils bad for you” and “Does chipotle use seed oils”
Trending Topics and Clusters
This view is US-centric in its data, offering userspredefined Trending Topics, these groups related keywords, so you can:
- Spot macro/ industry level trend
- Spot micro-trends within a broader topic (with clusters)
- Understand why a trend is rising or falling.
How Topics and Clusters work?
Topics help you identify the demand for bigger topics and smaller niches.
Topics are predefined keyword lists designed to analyze the latest consumer trends. 'Topics' provides a more comprehensive understanding of market dynamics and consumer behavior, enabling more strategic decision-making and trend analysis.
Clusters: These are pre-defined clusters that explain sub-trends within a larger topic, helping users to group keywords within a topic into meaningful groups.
Topics can be accessed in two ways:
- From the search bar - just like searching for any trend.
- From the Demand Analysis homepage. Explore suggested topics tailored to your interests and industry by clicking “Explore Topics.”
You can also browse predefined categories and subcategories to focus your analysis. This leads to the same experience you’d have when starting with a search term, keyword list, or AI Topic — allowing you to compare trends, see the global demand split, and dive into market insights.
What’s unique to Topics? Clusters.
Clusters group related keywords under a shared theme, helping you uncover niche trends you might miss when analyzing a single keyword. They’re ideal for spotting hidden opportunities and understanding the micro-trends driving a broader topic.
Keyword Clusters
Demand Analysis allows you to select from 1000s of pre-built Trending Topics to understand popular search trends from within a specific category.
Keyword Clusters are groups of keywords that exist within our predefined Trending Topics, which are built from 5000+ keywords each.
Keyword Clusters allow you to spot micro-trends within each topic. By analysing just these clusters of words, you're able to understand specifically why a micro-trend is occurring and what impact it is having on the wider topic in general.
Keyword Clusters allow you to assess:
- What is the size of a specific trend?
- Is it growing or declining?
- What are the micro-trends driving growth?
By default, the Keyword Clusters function is turned on once you access a predefined Trending Topic, but you can easily toggle this off and see the wider keyword breakdown for that topic too.
Comments
Please sign in to leave a comment.