Aside from search popularity, Google trends can help you determine the regions where the item is getting a lot of queries. If you are into market research this will help you determine where potential markets could be found. More specifically, overlooked markets where your product could sell well. In our case, Macross goodies.
If your wondering why data starts at 2004, its because that's the starting point of Google Trend Data.
Basing from the chart we can deduce that Macross started strong in 2004 then started to taper off. Most likely due to the Macross Zero series which had huge gaps between the episodes.
The lack of any new Macross anime between 2005-2007 showed the waning interest of the fans. 2007 however saw a spike in search results because of the preview of the first Macross Frontier episode during the Christmas of 2007. The sudden upspike again in Q1 of 2008 was because of the release of the Macross Frontier series in mainstream television. Then of course it goes down again once the series ended in Q4 of 2008.
The top five regions where Macross is popular are in Hong Kong, Chile, Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines. From here we learn that you should also start configuring your marketing to focus on not only the english speaking fans, but also spanish speaking ones as well since there are a lot of queries coming from spanish speaking countries. Guess this also means that dubs/subtitles for Macross DVD's should also have spanish version in them.
I'm thinking that the reason that Japan doesn't come out on top, is not because its not popular, but rather because the Japanese people will use the Katakana spelling of Macross when searching, rather than using English characters (or romaji). Then again, I heard that yahoo is more popular in japan than Google, so obviously they wouldn't have much google trend data.
I'm assuming that interest in Macross will go up again once the Macross Frontier movie gets released. Most likely around fall of this year if things go according to plan.
