FAQ: What is Glimpse Trends and How Do You Use It?

There are two ways to create content for the internet, both on your own blog and on social media. The first is to create evergreen, useful content that lasts for years with just a little attention paid to updating the information contained within. Evergreen content isn’t going to go hugely viral, but it sits there, passively attracting links and accruing value for a very long time. Build up enough evergreen content, and you’ll have an excellent site that sustains itself and can power anything else you want to do.

The problem with evergreen content is that it’s slow. It’s the snowball analogy, starting with a single snowflake and building up until you roll a ball, larger and larger until you can start an avalanche.

If you want to attract huge surges of traffic, the best way to do it is to capitalize on trends. Get in early on a topic that is poised to go viral, and you can be one of the most established and authoritative references for that topic when everyone suddenly starts looking for it.

This can be done in a few different ways. You can, for example, practice newsjacking. Newsjacking is where you pay attention to breaking news and create coverage that is relevant ASAP so that when people become aware of a topic, you’re right there for them to find. For example, say that a new development in household battery technology is about to be released; you could write a guide to existing battery tech and potential improvements and capitalize on people searching for information about that new battery tech.

You can also predict trends that are somewhat cyclical. An extremely obvious example is how, in October and November, every commercial blog and storefront starts ramping up content aimed at Black Friday and the Holidays.

If you’re already large and influential enough, you can astroturf your own trends, but that’s kind of irrelevant for those of us without millions of dollars to spend every month.

What’s really hard, though, is predicting one-off trends and capitalizing on them before they go viral. You need to:

• Keep an eye on a broad selection of industry and culture
• Watch for anything that can potentially go viral
• Find ways to capitalize on it if it does trend
• Prepare a campaign of content to lay the foundation to do so

That all requires a lot of proactive awareness, a lot of keen insight, the ability to predict the difference between a dud, a flash in the pan, and a real trend, and on top of that, the ability to rapidly produce content to capitalize on it.

Glimpse is a tool I’ve found recently that can help.

What is Glimpse?

Glimpse is a trend-watching and predictive analysis tool meant to streamline the whole process I outlined above. It claims to be the world’s largest trend-watching platform, with “the whole internet” as its data source. It has general-use, SEO, market research, e-commerce, PR, and investing angles, all of which operate in roughly the same way, allowing you to search through and identify the diamonds from the rough in terms of the massive amounts of signals and information cascading through the internet every second.

With Glimpse, you can browse trending information with extrapolations from a wide range of signals, and seek out topics that are poised to spike as a trend that lasts rather than a viral flash or a false start. Experts can do this through broad awareness and insight, but even the best expert is sometimes wrong; Glimpse promises a way to be broadly more successful at it.

What is Glimpse, Really?

Pulling back the curtain, Glimpse reveals itself. To sum it up, it’s “Google Trends on Steroids.” I don’t mean that in a comparative sense, either; their primary data source is Google Trends, and they use a proprietary AI system to extrapolate future data to sort trends from noise.

This is where a skeptic might step back, and I’m right there with you, except the use of the AI buzzword is a little off the mark. One thing that has been lost in current AI discussions is the difference between generative AI and machine learning. Machine learning, neural networks, and iterative data processing are ways to synthesize information in ways that humans can’t or can only do with intuition. It’s sort of the computer equivalent of vibe-checking data to see if it passes the sniff test.

Machine learning can be an immensely powerful way to process data and find things like trends that would just look like noise to the human eye. You can also take a machine learning algorithm and train it on a large pool of data – like historical Google trends data – and have it learn to distinguish between the trends that are ongoing versus the ones that aren’t. You can then put that algorithm to use on current data, and it can predict which current lead-up trends are likely to surge versus which aren’t. It might not be perfect, but it’s more accurate than just plain intuition.

One of my biggest gripes with the “AI” term is that this kind of useful, narrow machine learning has been subsumed by the AI buzzword, so people who know how unreliable and hallucination-prone things like ChatGPT and Google’s Search Summary are might reject it when the basis of the data is entirely different and more reliable.

Suffice it to say that Glimpse isn’t just taking a few keywords and asking the ChatGPT API which ones are better; it’s using more sophisticated methods for more reliable results. One clue to this is that Glimpse was around for years before generative AI hit the stage, so it’s not relying on that kind of AI data sourcing.

It’s interesting because, on the one hand, Glimpse is less than you might think (because it’s essentially just Google Trends coupled with machine learning, not unique data sources and synthesized trend information) and more than you might think (because the “AI” is more focused and useful than the buzzword implies.)

How to Make Use of Glimpse

Using Glimpse is surprisingly simple.

First, of course, you need to make an account. It’s free to sign up, though you’re limited in how much you get in terms of alerts and reports/insights. Paid accounts aren’t listed – you need to book a demo and talk to them directly – but from older data, it sounds like the casual plan is $50 per month, the business plan is $250 per month, and the enterprise level starts at $500 per month.

Once you make an account, you can download and activate their Chrome extension. This gives you all of the bonus data, trend growth information, and AI enhancements right on the Google Trends page.

From there, it’s basically just like using Google Trends normally, except you have a whole lot of extra information at your fingertips. Plug in a keyword, look for trending variations and topics within that keyword, explore, look for long-tail topics, manage your search parameters, and go to town.

Glimpse lets you do a few unique things from the Google Trends page. One important feature is the ability to have them alert you via email when a chosen keyword trend moves significantly, either up or down. You can get one-time alerts or recurring alerts, and the number you can use depends on your payment plan.

Glimpse also lets you download trend data as a CSV for your own in-house data management and tracking, which is either extremely useful or completely valueless, depending on whether or not you have any of your own processing set up.

One of the best features of Glimpse is that they take a generic topic you search and add in trend data for dozens or hundreds of additional related keywords, pulled from Google’s own “people also searched” boxes and other information sources. They also flag specific questions, attributes, and brands so you can filter your related searches to look for more actionable data.

While the majority of the useful data from Glimpse is in the Google Trends data, you can also get some trending information from other sources. These are basically social network data (from YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, and so on) or shopping data (from Amazon, Walmart Marketplace, Etsy, and so on.) Since Glimpse was originally developed as a way for small businesses to seek products to sell to capitalize on upcoming trends, it makes sense that these are the sources they use. They haven’t really expanded into more general-use sources that I might be more interested in personally, but if you’re in one of those more product-focused e-commerce niches, it can be quite handy.

Another handy bit of data is the display where Glimpse shows you not just the trend’s data itself but where the trend is trending. For example, a given trend might be spiking on LinkedIn but isn’t really relevant elsewhere; that might mean it’s poised to do so when it breaks containment, or it might mean it’s much more limited than the data suggests and is primarily propped up by LinkedIn bots.

Similarly, geographic filters can also be useful, especially if your brand isn’t capable of capitalizing on trends from other nations. If a topic is trending in Indonesia, that’s cool, but if you can’t sell to people in Indonesia, it’s a false lead for you.

Is Glimpse Worth Using?

In order to determine whether or not Glimpse is worth using for you, you need to ask yourself a few filtering questions.

Does your business currently rely on capitalizing on trends? If yes, Glimpse can potentially be a fantastic option. If not, you don’t really need to care as much about trending topics, so deep trending insights aren’t as useful.

It’s worth mentioning that trending topics can still be valuable for more evergreen topic research. Being able to capitalize on trends with evergreen content is a good “best of both worlds” strategy, though it’s harder than just evergreen content. I don’t know that Glimpse is the best way to find those topics – I like Topicfinder personally, though I’m obviously biased – but it’s still a potentially valuable addition to a workflow.

Do you already use Google Trends and wish it was better? If yes, Glimpse is very much tailor-made for you. Google Trends is one of those tools that has a lot of potential, but in my mind, it falls flat because of the limitations of what Google will tell you or provide to the public. By providing more machine learning analysis and deeper insight, Glimpse helps you get a lot more value out of Google Trends.

Do you want to start trend-chasing or using Google Trends? If so, get Glimpse and try it out. The free account is a little too limited for full business use, but if you just want to see what Google Trends offers with a little bit of enhancement, it’s fine. You can also pay for a month or two of the cheapest plan and see how it works for you.

Are your current methods of finding topics falling flat or feeling stale? Glimpse is great for topic and keyword research, trend-chasing, and getting some unique insights into connections and trends in the market that you might not otherwise see. It’s also excellent for product research. I’m on the content marketing end of the spectrum, so I don’t do the product research myself, but if it’s something you’re interested in, it’s a very useful source of data.

That said, I do still recommend giving Topicfinder a shot, either in addition to Glimpse, or instead of it for the time being. I made Topicfinder specifically to fulfill my needs as a content marketer and agency lead; I need to be able to rapidly find useful topics to target on a wide range of different industries where I’m not already an expert, and produce top-tier content in those niches very quickly. I built the platform from the ground up to help me do just that.

Something like Glimpse can help you with finding trends, and the product trend chasing is particularly valuable and not something I built into Topicfinder. So, using both together, for different sides of your business, might be a winning idea.

Leave a Comment