AMP Agency took home 4 awards last night at the 60th annual Hatch awards that celebrates creative excellence in New England. AMP won bronze awards for the below work: “Eastern Bank’s Color & Capital for Good closing Boston’s wealth Gap” Work for Good Category “Facebook’s Gaming Just Like Us” Film Category “Stop & Shop’s On Your Terms”Design Category AMP also won a Merit award for work done with RXBAR.  Be sure to check out AMP’s article featured in the Boston Globe that looks at the virtual realities of advertising and how flexibility led to a creative growth spurt in marketing in 2020.

In our continuing series of examining Google Search Trends to gain insights into the top keywords queried in the USA, we present our findings for January 2021. Every day, we capture the top three keyword phrases in terms of search volume as reported by Google Trends (US Only). Each term has an estimated query volume attached to it, which we also record. The number scale tops out at 10,000,000+ with a lower limit of 200,000+. After the conclusion of the month, we look at the phrases we collected along with their volumes to get an understanding of what drove queries for the month. The First Month of 2021 Well, we’re off to quite a start in 2021. There was a notion that with the flip of the calendar year the entire world would improve automatically. Now, we should all realize that years are a human construct and large changes to society don’t happen overnight. With that stated, we saw many historical developments in the month of January and the phrases we collected from Google Trends reflected those changes. One of the biggest shifts was related to how we categorized the search terms. We had to create a category called “Stocks” because of actions that people wanted to know more about that occurred in the later half of the month.  Here’s is the month that was by top Google Trends keywords, as analyzed by AMP Agency. January’s Top Queried Phrases There were a good number of phrases that were queried more that 10 million times over the course of a day in January.  Not all of them were driven by Google Doodles, most were driven by the need to know more about an event. Georgia Senate race - 1/4/2021 - 10,000,000+ queries Georgia election - 1/5/2021 - 10,000,000+ queries James Naismith - 1/14/2021 - 10,000,000+ queries Patrick Mahomes - 1/16/2021 - 10,000,000+ queries Martin Luther King Day - 1/17/2021 - 10,000,000+ queries Conor McGregor - 1/23/2021 - 10,000,000+ queries GameStop stock - 1/27/2021 - 10,000,000+ queries The first two keywords in our list are related to the United States Senate special election that was held in Georgia on January 5th.  These phrases were the most queried of all the politics-related keywords of the month, although there were a large group of them driven by political events that are examined in the next two sections.  The two Google Doodle driven keywords were James Naismith, the inventor of the game of basketball, and Martin Luther King Day, which celebrated the national holiday and day of service that honors the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  There were two sports-related keywords with over 10 million queries: Patrick Mahomes suffered a concussion in a NFL playoff game and Conor McGregor got knocked out during his bout at UFC 257. The world of sports was a main driver of search interest in January and we’ll explore the keywords that drove over 5 million queries in a section below. Lastly, actions in the US stock market drove more search volume in January 2021 than any other month since the beginning of 2019. The top query was GameStop stock on the 27th, but there were several others that piqued the interest of users trying to learn more and understand why certain stock prices were soaring. The End Of One  Presidency... The Georgia special election keywords were the most popular and they were a precursor to the keywords queried related to political events that happened in the last days of Trump’s Presidency. The following list presents the phrases of what people were searching before, during, and after the storming of the United States Capitol. Trump - 1/5/2021 - 5,000,000+ queries 25th Amendment - 1/6/2021 - 5,000,000+ queries Capitol - 1/6/2021 - 5,000,000+ queries News - 1/6/2021 - 5,000,000+ queries Brian Sicknick - 1/7/2021 - 500,000+ queries Parler - 1/8/2021 - 2,000,000+ queries Insurrection Act - 1/10/2021 - 1,000,000+ queries Trump impeachment - 1/11/2021 - 500,000+ queries 25th Amendment - 1/11/2021 - 500,000+ queries Impeachment - 1/12/2021 - 2,000,000+ queries The one interesting note from a search keyword/Google Trends reporting standpoint is the phrase of “News” from the 6th of January.  It’s as if we didn’t have any words to help guide our search. ...And The Beginning Of Another. With the new administration getting sworn in, there was increased search volume around the new President and Vice President and the Inauguration. Garth Brooks - 1/18/2021 - 500,000+ queries Inauguration - 1/19/2021 - 5,000,000 + queries Amanda Gorman - 1/19/2021 - 2,000,000+ queries Joe Biden - 1/19/2021 - 2,000,000+ queries Kamala Harris - 1/20/2021 - 2,000,000+ queries Poet Laureate - 1/20/2021 - 1,000,000+ queries Lady Gaga - 1/20/2021 - 1,000,000+ queries Jill Biden - 1/21/2021 - 1,000,000+ queries With all respect to Garth Brooks and Lady Gaga, the real big star coming out of the Inauguration was Amanda Gorman according to Google Trends. Fanatical About Finances As we stated in the beginning of this post, we had to create a new category for our keyword collections because of the number of keywords related to stocks. The highest queried phrase was “GameStop stock” on the 27th with over 10 million queries but here are the other stock-related keywords that made the daily top 3: GameStop - 1/21/2021 - 1,000,000+ queries GameStop stock - 1/25/2021 - 1,000,000+ queries GME - 1/25/2021 - 1,000,000+ queries GameStop stock price - 1/28/2021 - 1,000,000+ queries American Airlines stock - 1/28/2021 - 200,000+ queries Robinhood - 1/27/2021 - 5,000,000+ queries AMC Stock - 1/31/2021 - 5,000,000+ queries Along with the GameStop inquiries, the other companies mentioned are American Airlines and AMC. Certainly Reddit and Robinhood have changed the game of individual stock trading. Another financial topic that has been rising in search interest over the past few months is Cryptocurrency.  Here are the top terms from January 2021:  Bitcoin price - 1/2/2021 - 500,000+ queries Bitcoin - 1/11/2021 - 500,000+ queries Dogecoin - 1/27/2021 - 5,000,000+ queries Bitcoin’s price hit new highs twice in January along with Dogecoin, which is another cryptocurrency that was introduced in 2013, saw its price skyrocket as Reddit members and Elon Musk brought attention to it amid the GameStop short squeeze.  Lastly, many people were also interested in making a lot of money for low effort the old fashioned way - the Lottery: Mega Millions - 1/12/2021 - 2,000,000+ queries Powerball - 1/13/2021 - 1,000,000+ queries Mega Millions drawing - 1/15/2021 - 1,000,000+ queries Mega Millions - 1/22/2021 - 5,000,000+ queries With prizes ranging from 100s of millions to 1 billion dollars, users were very interested in the results of these lotteries. GridIron Football Dominates When we looked past the 10 million plus queries that were sports-related, we found that the 5 million plus queries were all North American football-related (not to be confused with football that we call soccer. People search for that type of football a lot in the USA), Ohio State Football - 1/1/2021 - 5,000,000+ queries Steelers - 1/9/2021 - 5,000,000+ queries Drew Brees - 1/17/2021 - 5,000,000+ queries Green Bay Packers - 1/24/2021 - 5,000,000+ queries Chiefs - 1/24/2021 - 5,000,000+ queries Ohio State won the College National Championship game this year as the Steelers took an early exit in the playoffs.  Drew Brees called it a career and the Green Bay Packers lost to Tom Brady’s Buccaneers.  Lastly, the Kansas City Chief made their way to the SuperBowl for the second year in a row. Next month, we’ll showcase how the major sports leagues fared in the times of COVID-19.  We’ll have a 12 month sample set by the time we’re writing up the February 2021 post. Thanks for reading. If you liked this article, we invite you to learn more about our SEO services. Until next month.

Welcome to the AMPlifier – a spotlight on the latest and greatest industry updates. Whether you want to learn more about this week’s marketing trends, the newest updates to your favorite social media platforms, or simply what meme is currently taking the internet by storm, then read on. You never know what you might learn. IS CLUBHOUSE THE NEXT BIG SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM FOR BRANDS? If you’ve been spending much time on social media lately you’re probably seeing some of the online buzz about the emerging new social audio platform Clubhouse, and more recently, the Twitter-backed competitor, Spaces, which has just launched in Beta. Read More TWITTER CONTINUES TO QUICKLY EVOLVE ITS CLUBHOUSE COMPETITOR 'SPACES As audio social platform Clubhouse continues to gain momentum, Twitter is working to quickly evolve and roll-out its own version of the same, with Twitter Spaces gradually trickling out to more users, and getting new feature upgrades in line with user response. Read More NANO INFLUENCERS: WHO ARE THEY AND HOW TO WORK WITH THEM [INFOGRAPHIC] When mapping out your influencer marketing strategy, the most common approach is to go for the biggest names, who'll offer you the biggest audience reach, and thus, the best return on your ad spend. But don't overlook the value of those with smaller, but more engaged, communities, who can also help connect you with the people who are increasingly more likely to buy from your brand. Read More That’s a wrap on this week’s feed. Stay tuned to see what happens next.