Ok as you can tell this post has nothing to do with Affiliate Marketing but it might demonstrate how powerful search data can be at predicting outcomes of an event. I’m not going to get into the Pros & Cons of the Lisbon treaty all I’m interested in is can we predict the outcome of the voting based on search trends? Now this isn’t going to be a perfect test as there are a lot of variables that we don’t have access to, so this is only based on search volumes and the ratio of anti or pro searchs related to the lisbon treaty.
The Data
First off lets look at the popular search terms related to the lisbon treaty:
| Keywords | Advertiser Competition | Local Search | Global |
| lisbon treaty no | 0.26 | -1 | 1300 |
| lisbon treaty no vote | 0.2 | -1 | 480 |
| lisbon treaty yes | 0 | -1 | 390 |
| no to lisbon treaty | 0 | -1 | 390 |
| vote no to lisbon treaty | 0 | -1 | 91 |
| yes to lisbon treaty | 0 | -1 | 91 |
| no to the lisbon treaty | 0 | -1 | 73 |
| pro lisbon treaty | 0 | -1 | 58 |
| vote yes to lisbon treaty | 0 | -1 | 46 |
| yes to the lisbon treaty | 0 | -1 | 16 |
| vote no to the lisbon treaty | 0.13 | -1 | -1 |
This isn’t the best way to make a judgement based on data analysis as this data set has been taken from Googles keyword suggestion tool which rely’s on last months search volume but its the best I’ve got available and this is a quick post so it’s what I’ll use as a rough indicator. I’ve trimed the list down to the searches that I could associate with either a yes or a no vote. Based on what I visually could see it leans more toward a “No” due to the slightly greater ratio of negative searches compared to pro but more importantly due to volume of negative searches compared to pro.
Can Search Trends accurately predict the vote?
This is what we are here to find out but lets look at the data we have available compared to the last vote. As we all know we had a No vote in the last round so if we analyse the data in Google Insights to see if it confirms this we get the following:
From the above graph it looks like it accurately predicted the outcome. So lets examine the graph more closely based on search trends during the past month to see if we can predict the next outcome:
From the above graph it looks like we’ll have a No vote again. Like I said this isn’t an accurate test but just a bit of fun inspired by a chapter in Bill Tancer’s book, Click. Whatever way you vote is entirely your choice. Will I be right in my prediction, only time will tell!
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