Everyone thinks they know who is going to win American Idol this season: your mom, your 12-year-old sister, about half of the people you follow on Twitter and even Simon Cowell all seem to agree that California rocker Adam Lambert will be this year’s champ.
Well, now you can add digital marketers to the growing list of Adam-believers – but for a different reason.
What if you could predict the winner of American Idol before the final votes were tallied - without having followed the season’s contest or listened to the pundits – by analyzing online search trends alone? Are search trends really a proxy for what will happen in the future?
By looking at Google search trends – volume, demographic and geographic – from March through May for the top three finalists of prior seasons, we were able to spot patterns in the data that seem to predict the eventual winner of American Idol Season 8.
So, how do this year’s search trends enable us to predict Adam as tonight’s winner? Well, it’s certainly not as simple as looking at who has the most search volume. We must first take a trip down memory lane.
Revisiting past seasons
The year was 2006. George W. Bush was still president, Facebook had 15 million users and salt-and-pepper soul man Taylor Hicks was busy belting out “Levon” on the Idol stage.
Here's what happened during the show's fifth season:
• Hicks dominated much of the search volume from early March through the finale.
• Eventual runner-up Katharine McPhee passed Hicks for a brief window in late April and early May, but Hicks surpassed her and rode the momentum through the finale.
• According to analysis by our team, third place contestant Elliot Yamin never had a prayer.
A closer look at geographic search trends reveals that Hicks had a clear edge over McPhee in Yamin's most active states (by search volume). When Yamin was voted off on May 10, his voters likely skewed in favor of Hicks over McPhee.
In 2007, America whittled down the Idol playing field to teenage phenom Jordan Sparks, offbeat beat-boxer Blake Lewis and R&B songstress Melinda Doolittle.
• Unlike the previous year, search volume for the top three during Season 6 remained close from March through May.
• Doolittle was ousted from the show on May 16, but her passionate fan base took their enthusiasm to Google. Note the relative surge in search volume following her departure.
Given Doolittle's immense popularity, we wanted to see how her absence from the show would affect votes for Sparks and Lewis. A closer look revealed that Sparks received more related searches than Lewis – a key insight into why Sparks was eventually able to edge out Lewis in the finale.
Finally, last year, America was torn between two Davids – Cook and Archuleta – who traded search volume jabs as Idol’s seventh season drew to a close. Third place contestant Syesha Mercado was a laggard throughout March and April, statistically flat-lining when compared to the Davids.
We wanted to see where Syesha's fans were more likely to migrate following her removal from the show. Once again, we looked to geographic search trends. Syesha's top states were large, and leaned convincingly in Cook's direction. The fact that Archuleta's home state of Florida also skewed in Cook's favor was perhaps another sign of the 17-year-old's eventual defeat.
This season’s prediction
Now back to the present:
• The past three seasons had not seen a front runner quite like Adam Lambert, who has dominated search competition week after week.
• Danny Gokey, a contestant who many pundits believed would eventually face Adam in the finale, was voted off the show last Tuesday.
• Gokey and finalist Kris Allen were neck-in-neck in search volume throughout March, April and May, with Kris taking a slight lead over Danny in early April.
So, why predict Adam Lambert as the eventual winner over Kris Allen? Although Adam has had a clearer lead in search than the winners of past seasons - making a win seem more likely - a closer look shows that the geographic indicators of past seasons also seem to be holding true this time around.
Once again we looked at how the third place contestant’s exit would influence the search volumes of the remaining two finalists – and given this, the future looks bright for Adam Lambert. With the exception of Kris Allen’s home state of Arkansas, Lambert dominates Allen’s and Gokey’s top states. Moreover, Gokey’s search volume was not competitive with Lambert’s – and regional interest for Gokey suggests his voters will support Lambert.
So can search predict the future? Will Adam Lambert be the next Idol champion? Millions of Americans – ourselves included – will have to wait for tonight’s results show, but one thing’s for certain: looking at search trends can reveal a lot about what people are interested in right now.