Aug
09
2006

The Baby Names Conundrum

Posted by under Consumer Behavior

I’m just back from Search Engine Strategies, where we had a great turnout for our three presentations on Monday. During my Searchonomics (so named becuase the book Freakonomics gave me the idea for the session), I spent my 35 minutes sharing my favorite charts from prom dresses to gas prices to unemployment predictions. I also promised to share a chart from my “yet to be solved” file.
For those of you that were not in the audience, occasionally I run across a chart that displays a pattern that I can not explain. One of my top “yet to be solved” patterns is “baby names.”
baby names and pregnancy.png
As you can see from the chart below, in 2004-2005 the query baby names displayed some very strong but apparently random spikes in searches, which occurred again in Feb 2006. My first reaction was that there was a celebrity baby factor. But employing our search term suggestion tool (which provides us with the most popular queries containing a phrase (in this case “baby names”)) yielded nothing to confirm that hypothesis.
So in a new use of the blog, I’ve decided to put the chart out there for thoughts from our readership. Send back some of your own theories around the reason for these spikes via comments and I’ll attempt to correlate (you see from the above chart that I tried “pregnancy” alongside “baby names” and the two appear unrelated).
Look forward to your comments

TAGS:
CATS: Consumer Behavior

    • David
    • August 9th, 2006

    Here’s my theory — humorous but I think it has some validity. December/January are cold winter months. Couples are homebound, and may be more likely to, um, be intimate. Late January, early February is when they notice breaks from their routine, visit the doctor and find out they’re expecting. Then its onto the Internet to research baby names. Of course, this is just a theory, and I’ve yet to conduct any primary research. =)

  2. Very interesting. Some guesses:
    1) Women might tend to get tested for pregnancy results on a specific day (First Monday after they miss their period?)
    2) You might want to try to correlate this graph with the new born babies in the US by month and apply a 40-week delta to see if correlates.
    3) Your data is incorrect.
    Let me know if you find out. :)

  3. I think the spikes have to do with celebrities. Take a look at this for baby names and Suri: http://www.google.com/trends?q=suri%2C+baby+names&ctab=1&geo=all&date=all

  4. Thanks for posting this. I love a good mystery :) .

    A few questions:

    • Where are the spikes, and how sharp are they? Are they on specific days, or spread over two or three? Can you tell us which days?
    • Which countries are most of these ‘spike’ queries coming from? Or are they just from all over?
    • What other terms *are* found with ‘baby names’? You mention it’s not celebrity names. Or is it mostly just ‘baby names’ by itself?

    Some possibilities:

    • According to Google, a lot of the queries for ‘baby names’ come from India. Perhaps the pattern has something to do with that? I can’t imagine a vague relationship coming up with the sharp peaks you see.
    • Maybe it’s celebrities in other parts of the world? Again, people could just be curious as to what names a new baby *might* get. Don’t see how you’d get the spikes, though.

    Do post up a follow-up when you figure this out – the results ought to be pretty interesting.

  5. Very fun question. Perhaps these are not spikes at all. It could just be that there aren’t enough searches. You see more spikes in the first year than in the second year. Since these are percentages, it could be that the base is small, and small variations in the number of spikes are causing wide variations in the percentage.
    As Google usage grows (the second year of data) as a tool for finding baby names, the spikes may smooth out because the base is growing larger.
    Just an idea.

  6. Just wanted to drop a quick note that the searchonomics session was excellent – I’m a big freakonomics fan myself, and I have a natural curiousity of the trends and economics behind search statistics. Some very interesting data and parallels – thanks for sharing.

  7. What I see in Italy is big spikes of ‘names’ and ‘name meaning’ related to ‘pregnancy’ in last times.
    Maybe a baby boom is to be expected globally?
    As a relief and a hope in opposition to the bad times we are living?
    http://www.google.com/trends?q=significato+nomi+%2C+gravidanza&ctab=1&geo=all&date=all

    • Anonymous
    • August 14th, 2006

    Maybe just people getting romantic over Valentines Day and searching for the potential future ?!

    • Chris S.
    • August 16th, 2006

    My wife tends to be prompted to search for baby names by headlines on hotmail, msn, and cnn. Headlines about babies, names, etc on popular sites like these might influence others to do the same causing spikes around when those headlines are posted on the sites.

    • Hroyale
    • August 23rd, 2006

    This one is probably more related to marketing. After Christmas, retailers push babies since that stuff sells all year. It’s used to help keep sales from falling off too dramatically in Feb.
    Compare this to ads run showing babies and baby goods and I bet you see the same pattern.

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