Are customer calls less frequent than expected for this time of year? One way to determine the ‘busyness’ of the pest season is to use the tools available from Google.
When we’re asking whether it’s a good pest season or a bad pest season, most pest managers rightly believe that seasonality (the difference in pest pressure from year to year) is perhaps the most important determining factor. But even if it’s a good pest season, there is one factor that can put a dampener on potential sales and that’s the state of the economy, which is particularly relevant at the moment. But how can you tell whether it’s a good or bad pest season and whether the state of the economy is impacting sales?
A quick way to get a good read on seasonality is to use the keyword planner in Google Ads. The keyword planner is a great way to get an understanding of the kinds of searches your potential customers are performing in Google. Google provides the approximate number of monthly searches for an entered keyword, and you can see the number of searches of the keyword for each month over a four-year period (Figure 1). It then becomes relatively easy to compare the number of searches in a particular month with the number of searches in the same month in the previous year.
‘Pest control’ is a very generic search term that will give you a topline picture of seasonality. If the pest pressure is low or if the economy is bad (meaning homeowners have less money for professional pest control), then the number of searches for ‘pest control’ will be down. Figure 2 shows the number of searches for three major keywords, for a number of locations across the country. For all locations, apart from Sydney and Tasmania, the number of searches for ‘pest control’ is down significantly on 2023. Across Australia, search volume for ‘pest control’ was down 18%. This supports data from the last Pest Pulse survey, which indicated that the amount of revenue from residential pest control was down on 2023 for many pest control companies.
We can also get a feel for whether this is due to pest pressure or the economy. If we look at the number of searches for ‘pest control Bunnings’, we see that the number of searches in October was up 53% on the prior year. All things being equal, it could be assumed that if the economic situation was the same year on year, that the change in the percentage of monthly searches for ‘pest control’ should match the change in monthly searches for ‘pest control Bunnings’, as pest numbers fluctuate. As ‘pest control’ has gone down, and ‘pest control Bunnings’ has gone up significantly, this would indicate that the economic situation is impacting consumer decisions and that at least some of those looking for pest control services are turning to DIY options.
However, searches for ‘termite inspection’ and ‘termite treatment’ were up in October versus last year in many locations – up 13% on average across Australia. Dealing with a termite attack is not really a discretionary service and so with the warm, wet weather, it is perhaps not surprising that termite pressure remains high. Two locations however, indicated significant drops in search volume – Perth and Gold Coast. This observation is perhaps a little more difficult to explain but could be due to variations in the timing of termite swarms, year on year. For example, although the number of searches for ‘termite inspection’ was down 35% in Perth in October versus prior year, it was up 24% in September versus prior year. So, for termite search terms it may be wise to look at search volume over a two- or three-month period to account for such year-on-year fluctuations.
In summary, the search volumes from Google suggest it’s pretty tough out there at the moment in the residential pest control world, although the termite market appears generally strong.
