September 18, 2020 - A look at historic search history in Croatia through Google Trends, with some rather surprising findings.
I must say that I am more than a little surprised.
With the huge rise in tourism numbers over the last few years, I was curious to see how that interest in Croatia was reflected in people's Internet searching habits. And if we are looking for data, there is no better place than the Google god, and its rather useful Google Trends tool in particular.
Google Trends has information on search data dating back to 2004 (just in case you were wondering when people started taking an interest in your online habits), some 16 years ago. It is a very useful tool to track interest in a certain topic, and so, just for fun, I entered the keyword 'Croatia' into the system.
No prizes for guessing what the big spike is in July, 2018... the World Cup in Russia of course, a time when Brand Croatia was one of the hottest things on the planet due to the marvellous performances of the team on the pitch and the fans off it, as well as THAT shirt. Croatia was HOT, and never was there such global interest in the tiny country which dared to dream.
I have written about Google Trends before, and the spikes every two years reflect Croatia's participation and success in the Euros or World Cup, but the first major surprise for me was that it seems that - football aside - search interest in Croatia was bigger back in 2004 than it is today.
And then an even bigger surprise.
Google Trends stores information on different sections of interest - this is how search interest in Croatia looks over time for travel since 2004. Apart from the brief (and it was brief) tourism interest dividend after the World Cup, it seems that interest in Croatian travel has been declining over the years. If the source was not the Google god, I would be a little skeptical of the data.
Some individual country charts of overall interest - the UK for travel.
And the UK in general.
The United States.
I was expecting a large increase in interest from countries such as Norway, which has discovered Croatia in a big way in the last few years... but not really.
Not all the trends were downward. German interest in Croatia peaked to its highest ever level after the World Cup.
Although, and again surprisingly...
That surge of interest was not reflected in travel.
Surprising trends. Feel free to play with the tool yourself here.
There are lessons to be learned in there somewhere, and one of them is not a surprise at all. Football sells, and there is perhaps no better medium to get widespread global exposure. Just ask Rwanda. Despite never having been to the World Cup or had a player play in the Premier League, the Visit Rwanda logo is seen 35 million times a day on Arsenal shirts around the world. Learn more in Lessons from Rwanda: Promoting Tourism Through Football, African-Style.
