Project Management Software is a Google trends conundrum

Is life busy?

Wrong question, right?

A decade or till about 15 years ago; work, business, emails and project exchanges were only a weekday phenomenon. Most of the team members were usually stationed in a single location as they went about doing their tasks.

Fast forward to 2016.

Business, work, emails and project updates are live and real-time thanks to the omnipresent gadget on our hands – the Smartphone. I sometimes feel melancholy that they have actually taken over our lives.

Back to the subject.

This digital deluge has made work continuous, literally. Sundays exist; only on the calendar. If you happen to talk to few companies (especially in software), you would know of a few cases where deals have happened on a Sunday weekend.

It has also created ‘overwhelming’ problems. Given the fast and continuous pace of digital activities and transactions, it is only natural to get overwhelmed, quickly. Thus, hampering productivity – unable to find the right emails at the right time, missing files, multiple versions of files, access issues and so on. Such productivity irritants, could compromise the success of critical projects running on deadlines.

This has, logically, prompted the springing up of new age online project management software companies that attempt to keep you at work wherever you are.Software that hit the shelves last decade have also modified themselves to stay current and relevant.

All this should have probably manifested itself in an increasing activity online. Not, if you look at data coming from Google trends.

Let us search for “Project Management Software” on Google trends.

Here is what we see.

Please note that Google trends provides trends data 2004 onwards only.

Digging deeper and changing the tracking time period to the last 3 years, we see a more stable trendline.

Searching for “Project Management Software” in Google trends from January 2013 to 2016, we see this.

 What could explain this 10 year decreasing trend?

• Is it because the start of the last decade saw a build of physical projects like infrastructure, real estate, construction and related sectors? And that seems to have stabilized today.
• Or is it because it was still early day at Google in the middle of the last decade? Please note that the Google trend numbers represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart. It doesn’t convey absolute search volume. In our case the denominator would stand for the ‘highest’ google search term.
• Or maybe the term is getting replaced with other terms like ‘team collaboration software’, ‘online project management software’ or ‘workflow management software’?
• Or are we just reading too much into the trend without giving credence to absolute data points?

Would you like to find out?

Absolute Search volume from Google keyword planner

Heading to the google keyword planner tool and searching for ‘project management software’ indicates almost 50,000 monthly searches on an average for the last 24 months.

Too bad, we do not have data before 2014.

What is clear though that in the short-term, project management software search term has kept its ground.

New Search terms replacing project management software

Input ‘team collaboration software’ into Google trends and you will see how this term is just beginning to gain visibility.

This increasing trend is noticeable not just for new category search terms, but also for brand keywords like ‘Binfire’ and other competing project management software products.

Google Trends for ‘Binfire’

 What is your take?

 Tell us all about it in the comments section.