For Throwback Thursday today, I'm jumping back to the topic of having designer brands on your website.
When it comes time to consider a new jewelry designer for your store, you have an extra tool at your fingertips to help decide if you should buy into the line or not. However you evaluate a new line, you can also use Google Trends to help you decide.
If the jewelry designer is a well known brand, you can check to see if their name carries any weight in search.
Visit https://www.google.com/trends/ and type the designer name into the "Explore topics" box at the top of the screen. This is what it looks like:
As a random test, I searched for "gabriel and co" and saw these results:
This chart shows a graphical representation for the search phrase "gabriel and co" since October 2009 when it first appeared. It's important to realize that this is a relative representation of search volume on a scale of 1 to 100 rather than exact search volume count. The search phrase could have millions of searches or it could have just 1000 searches nations wide and this chart would look the same.
The next part of this trends report shows the regional interest as you see here on this map:
According to this map, the phrase "gabriel and co" is only searched for in the United States.
The last part of the trends report shows the related search phrases that were also searched. Here's the "gabriel and co" associated searches:
Using This Information
Evaluating this information is pretty simple. First, if the designer name does not appear in search trends, then that means the designer does not advertise their name. Without advertising, the general public would never search for their name. This also means that promoting a designer name won't carry any name recognition. If there's a choice between promoting your store name and the name of an unknown designer, it's far better to build your own brand than promote the unknown designer.
The chart shows that people started searching for the name "gabriel and co" in 2009. I'd assume that's when Gabriel & Co started heavily advertising their name to the public. There's a possibility here that you could use the Gabriel & Co name in your advertising. According to the Related Searches report you see that that the search phrase "gabriel and co" has the variations "gabriel jewelry," "gabriel & co" (which is the official name), and "gabriel and company."
Conclusions
The above quick investigative process will show you if the new designer you're looking at will help supplement your own advertising efforts. The advertising dollars they've spent to promote themselves will certainly help to promote their sales from your store.
