Dave F.
Weak lie about Tesla Google search data…
Weak lie about Tesla Google search data and leaves the article up. Don't trust this publication!
Response from FinanceBuzzNov 15, 2021
Hi Dave, It seems that you’re referring to our story https://financebuzz.com/most-popular-electric-vehicles-by-state. We take the legitimacy of our data studies and content seriously. Short answer: Teslas may be (and almost certainly are) receiving more total Google searches. But other cars like the Mach-E are seeing their search volume increase by higher percentages - Google sees this as a sign of popularity and ranks them higher. Here is the break down the methodology behind the data: Depending on how you search in Google Trends, you can either look at normalized data or raw data. We chose to use normalized data to represent popularity in this story. To start, it's worth looking at how Google Trends works and scores “Search Interest,” which is what we refer to as “Popularity” in our article. An important thing to note is that Google Trends normalizes and scales results within their platform. From their FAQ: "How is Google Trends data normalized? Google Trends normalizes search data to make comparisons between terms easier. Search results are normalized to the time and location of a query by the following process: Each data point is divided by the total searches of the geography and time range it represents to compare relative popularity. Otherwise, places with the most search volume would always be ranked highest. The resulting numbers are then scaled on a range of 0 to 100 based on a topic’s proportion to all searches on all topics. Different regions that show the same search interest for a term don't always have the same total search volumes." What this means is that when you search for an individual term within Trends, the result is not just based on raw search volume. It's scaled to account for things like population, while also being relative to other search terms within a geographic area. That normalization is not applied in the same way when comparing two or more terms directly against each other. With this kind of comparative search in Google Trends, the results reflect the raw number of searches without the same normalization. That's why when you search for the Ford Mustang Mach-E by itself, using the normalized data, you see a higher search interest or “popularity” in a state like Nevada than when you search for Tesla Model 3 the same way. But when compared head to head, where Google Trends looks at raw searches, the results can and often do look much different. Is there one way that's right and one that's wrong? Nope. But we used normalized results in this case because we feel it provides a truer representation of popularity. PS - We are just reporting the data and don't have any advertising relationship with Ford or Tesla. If you have further questions, please email us at [email protected]. Thank you, The FinanceBuzz Team