Almost a month ago, we dug into Google Trends in South Africa relating to the country-wide lockdown due to the corona virus. It feels like now is a good time to look at the same graphs again to see where we currently stand.
In this article, we're going to focus purely on the South African trends rather than worldwide so as to not make this article too long and allow you, as the readers, to quickly consume the information. If we see the trends change again, we will publish again in a month, it could be very interesting to see how things move based on the timeline and related to lockdown levels that we're experiencing.
Note: Numbers represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region and time. A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term. A value of 50 means that the term is half as popular. A score of 0 means there was not enough data for this term.
South Africa: Coronavirus
It's not much of a surprise to see that the trend around searches related to the coronavirus have declined. By this stage, everyone is well aware and we've moved from top of funnel into a more educated position. Perhaps the focus has shifted to understanding the current levels and what we can and can't do. By means of an example, below the chart below, we've included a chart for searches around, "dog walking".
South Africa: "buy online"
Buying and shopping online was always going to experience an upward trend but looking at the graph below shows just how aggressive this trend is becoming. eTailers are opening up more and more, we foresee this trend sticking around for a while. The most interesting thing will be whether we experience an increased online shopping presence once we've moved passed the pandemic - we believe we will.
South Africa: Travel
It's interesting to see "travel" increasing as it is over the past couple of weeks. One might say that this is people within the travel industry researching but there's more than likely a lot of people who are eager to find out when they might be able to take a break or see loved ones. Also, a lot of people looking to move between provinces for various reasons would contribute to this.
South Africa: Hand sanitiser and masks
South Africa: Unemployment
As said last month in the charts, this is the saddest chart of all of them. More and more people are losing their jobs, being retrenched or being put on salary holidays. It's a very hard time for all of us and we can only pray that things will get better, and aggressively when the time is right.
South Africa: Entertainment
South Africa: Cigarettes
Nothing surprising here and perhaps nothing to speak about. There are too many opinions around this topic so we'll leave it at that.
South Africa: Alcohol
South Africa: Knitting
South Africa: Journaling
South Africa: Cooking
South Africa: Yoga
South Africa: Board Games
South Africa: Sports
South Africa: Gardening
South Africa: Baking
South Africa: Rand Dollar
South Africa: Credit Card
South Africa: Debt
South Africa: Mobile Data
South Africa: WiFi
South Africa: Banks
As we mentioned in the beginning of the post, we didn't want to make this a long post so we're going to sign off there and hope that you've found this to be an interesting read.
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Keep safe!