About Insights Finder

Insights Finder helps you to turn aggregated and anonymized signals into meaningful and actionable insights for your marketing strategy. It uses combined data from Google Search and YouTube to help you better understand your brand’s presence on Google platforms, your audience's search behavior, and key content trends.

This article explains Insights Finder, how to use it, and the benefits of using it.

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Benefits of using Insights Finder

  • Explore your influence: Understand how users perceive, search for, and engage with your brand and other brands on Google properties.
  • Discover growth opportunities: Explore topics of interest to find opportunities to grow your brand with new audiences and align your brand with the content and moments you most care about.
  • Build more actionable plans: Find the insights you need to build more informed media plans and translate insights into impactful strategies to reach audiences with messages that resonate.

Get started: Eligibility and requirements

Before you can use Insights Finder, you must do the following checks:

  • Check availability: Ensure Insights Finder is available in your country. It serves most agency partners and brands.
  • Confirm your access: Contact your Google account representative to confirm your eligibility and access. When you have access, log in using your email address.
Note: Google doesn’t guarantee the performance of any advertising campaign that you may run based on data provided through Insights Finder.

How Insights Finder works

Get to know your audience with Insights Finder

For subtitles in your language, turn on YouTube captions. Select the settings icon Image of YouTube settings icon at the bottom of the video player, then select "Subtitles/CC" and choose your language.

Insights Finder is a tool that allows you to use Google data to uncover trends, find your audience, and discover ways to reach your audience. You can pick a topic of interest from our expansive list and then select your desired parameters.

When you select "Find insight", you can explore a suite of available insights organized into different tabs in the "Overview" page to help you understand specific insights about your category, brand, or audience. Here’s a breakdown of what you can find in each insights tab.

Audience insights

The Audience insights tab provides a view of your defined audience's demographics, interests, what they watch on YouTube, and ways to reach them. You can explore the audience profile and personas interested in your topic and discover how they engage on Google to inform your audience strategy.

  • Composition:You can view your audience's demographic attributes (age, gender), location, lifestyle segments (Affinity, In-market).
  • Interests: Discover other topics, brands, and categories your audience is interested in, based on their online activity.
  • Key Metrics:
    • Share: The percentage of your audience with a specific interest.
    • Index: How much more likely your audience is to have an interest compared to a baseline audience.
    • Relevance: A combined score of Share and Index that highlights distinctive interests with a reasonable reach.
Note: For audience-related information, Insights Finder data shows the likelihood of your audience being interested in a topic, versus a baseline audience, which is by default, the user population in the selected location. Google-defined lifestyle and behavioral audiences are based on anonymized, aggregated user behavior from various Google properties.

YouTube insights

Discover popular content for a topic and what your audience watches on YouTube. You can also find the total views for your topic on YouTube and the most relevant videos being watched.

  • Topic-level views: Explore 3-year indexed view trends for videos related to your topic, which includes a breakdown of views on Connected TV (CTV).
    • Note: This view data is for the topic only and isn’t filtered by your audience selections.
  • Content: Find popular Shorts and long-form videos related to your selected topic and discover channels and the types of content your defined audience watches on YouTube.
  • Potential lineups and reach: Identify relevant YouTube Select Lineups to align your brand with premium content, and estimate your potential reach with those lineups.

Search insights

Explore Google Search data to find emerging and declining trends related to your topic or category. This tab also allows you to learn more about how users search for your topic, which includes lists of relevant and trending queries.

  • Trends: Shows search volume over time. Specifically, you can view the indexed search volume for your topic over the past 3 years.
  • Queries: Find specific search queries that you may find useful, which are categorized as:
    • Top: Most searched queries.
    • Rising: Increasingly popular over the past 6 months.
    • Emerging: Became popular recently.
    • Sustained: Steadily popular over 18 months.
    • Declining: Less popular over the past 3 months.

Note:

  • Search Insights are based on queries related to your topic, not just those that contain the exact terms. Associations are built based on user click behavior.
  • Audience definitions like age, gender, and interests don't apply to Search Insights.
  • Search data is typically available at the country-level only.

Insights for you

Discover insights about how your brand is perceived, searched for, and engaged with on Google. You must select your brand and market in order to view the brand insights.

Note: This feature is currently available to select users.

How to use Insights Finder

Follow the instructions below to start using the Insights Finder.

Step 1 of 3: Enter your topic and set parameters

  1. Go to the Insights Finder page.
  2. In the "Topics" search bar, enter a topic such as a brand, interest, or category like "Beauty" and choose from the suggested options.
    • Note: You may select multiple topics to get combined results. Keep in mind that advertising policies may prevent some sensitive topics from generating results.
  3. In the "Location & date" section, select a specific location and date range.
  4. In the "Demographic" section, set your chosen gender and age.
    • Note: You can also set the "Parental status" and "Income" when you select the "More audience details" drop down.
  5. In the "Audience segments" section, enter or select pre-defined Google audiences like affinity or in-market segments.
  6. In the "YouTube lineups" section, enter or select YouTube lineups.
  7. Select Find insights to generate your results. You’ll be directed to the "Overview" page where you’ll find the "Audience insights", "YouTube insights", "Search insights", and "Insights for you" tabs at the top of the page.
  • Adjust the baseline audience: Customize your baseline to make more specific comparisons. For example, to find what makes your "Females 18-24 interested in Skincare" audience unique, set the baseline to "Females 18-24" to find differences beyond just age and gender.
  • Analyze by date: Use flexible date ranges (up to 11 months back) to understand seasonality.

Step 2 of 3: Explore the Insights Finder page

The "Overview" page provides a summary of key insights from the different tabs:

  • Audience insights: Select this tab to understand your audience's demographics, interests, and media habits.
  • YouTube insights: Select this tab to discover popular content for your topic and find what your audience watches on YouTube.
  • Search insights: Select this tab to understand how users search for your topic or category on Google.
  • Insights for you: Select this tab and choose your brand and market to view brand-centric insights.
    • Note: This feature is currently available to select users.

You can also navigate the different sections on the left-hand menu for a more granular view of your insights.

  • Find niche groups: To find a niche, passionate group, go to "Audience Insights" and look for interests with a high index and a low share. If an interest has a low index and a high share, it simply means it's a common interest for everyone.
  • Discover emerging trends: Use the "Top" and "Rising" search categories to find new trends and opportunities to align your brand with new topics.
  • Align with premium content: In "YouTube Insights", identify YouTube Select Lineups that your audience has a high propensity to watch to align your brand with premium content.

Step 3 of 3: Export or share your insights

You can download your data, generate a Google slides report, or get a direct link to your report.

Download CSV or create Google slides

  1. In the Insights Finder page, select the download iconA picture of the download icon for Google Ads and Merchant Center at the top right corner.
  2. Select Download to CSV to get raw data for custom analysis.
  3. Select Create slides to generate a Google slides report that can be saved to your Google Drive.

Share report

  1. In the Insights Finder page, select the share icon at the top right corner.
  2. Select Copy link.

Important: You must mark all data from Insights Finder as "CONFIDENTIAL" and shouldn’t share outputs publicly without getting explicit approval. As an agency, you can only share insights with a brand if you have a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) with Google.

Availability

Insights Finder is available to the majority of our agency partners as well as brands. Specifically, it is available in the following countries:

List of available countries

  • Australia
  • Brazil
  • Canada
  • France
  • Germany
  • Hong Kong
  • India
  • Indonesia
  • Italy
  • Japan
  • Mexico
  • Netherlands
  • South Korea
  • Singapore
  • Spain
  • Taiwan
  • Thailand
  • Turkey
  • United Arab Emirates
  • United Kingdom
  • United States
  • Vietnam

To check if you're eligible to get access to Insights Finder, contact your Google account representative.

Keep in mind

  • Privacy-focused approach: Insights Finder uses anonymized and aggregated data from user activity across Google properties.
  • Differential Privacy: To further protect user privacy, Insights Finder uses Differential Privacy, an industry standard. This involves techniques like adding statistical noise and setting minimum audience sizes for reporting. This means you might find slight data fluctuations or that very niche topics may not return results.
  • Data sources and interpretation: Audience insights are determined by a combination of user interactions such as searches, clicks, and YouTube views related to topics and inferred demographics and Google-defined audiences such as affinity, in-market, and life events.
  • Data refresh frequency:
    • Audience data: Refreshed weekly, looking back at the last 30 days (unless a different month is selected).
    • Search data: Refreshed monthly, typically 1-2 weeks into the next month, with a 3-year lookback.
    • YouTube views data: Refreshed monthly.

FAQs

Why can’t I access Insights Finder?

If you have trouble logging in, make sure that you're using your email associated with a Google Account. Try clearing cache or cookie. Contact your Google account representative to confirm your access.

Why does data in Insights Finder differ from other Google tools?

Data may differ slightly due to different methodologies or data-refresh cycles. Differential Privacy also adds statistical noise to protect user anonymity.

Should I use Index or Share?

  • Use Share: To understand the size or volume of an interest.
  • Use Index: To understand how unique or distinctive that interest is.
  • Relevance: Helps balance both factors.

Do my audience selections apply to all insight tabs?

No. Audience definitions (age, gender, interests) don’t apply to Search Insights or the topic-level YouTube views data in YouTube Insights. Broader topic-level data informs these insights.

Why can't I export my report to Google Slides?

If you are having trouble exporting, try the following solutions based on the issue you’ve encountered:
  • Can't find the "Disclaimer" or "Export" button: If you can't find the "Disclaimer" or "Export" button, scroll to the bottom of the pop-up window. When you select the checkbox next to the disclaimer, the "Export" button will appear.
  • If your export fails, gets stuck, or shows an error: You may be facing a temporary issue. Wait one hour and try again. If you still have problems, contact Google support for assistance.

Why can't I find my topic in Insights Finder?

Insights Finder currently supports millions of topics, and we’re continually improving our coverage. Note that coverage of these topics varies depending on parameters like location and demographics of the audience. We also enforce privacy controls, so the tool may not be able to generate results for topics with lower volume.

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