It has been widely thought that brand search volume—the counts of queries that a search engine receives from users that include specific brand names, like “iPhone”—can predict sales for that brand. Google makes this information available to marketers for free through Google Trends, an application that allows anyone to see how frequently popular brand names are searched, and it has become a valuable tool for marketers. But new research from Drexel University, Brigham Young University and Google shows there is a lot more to consider when looking at the large number of queries that include brand names.