It’s time for our annual National Frozen Yogurt Month feature, where we take a look at the popularity of frozen yogurt, based on Google Trends. Google Trends captures how often people use particular search terms on Google Search, which has a search engine market share of 92% in 2021. Bing comes in second with a market share of slightly under 3%. Google Trends makes it easy to compare search volume trends over time and by geographic region.
Worldwide interest in frozen yogurt over the last five years peaked in late June 2017. The pattern of interest is clearly seasonal, with local peaks every year in June and July and declines during the winter months. Since 2017, interest declined gradually in 2018 and 2019 and more dramatically in March and April 2020, when many froyo shops were closed due to the coronavirus pandemic. For example, the 2020 peak in June 2020 was 30% lower than June 2017. Interest has picked up since then as the weather has warmed and froyo shops have reopened. The search volumes in March 2021 were higher than March 2020 but remain much lower than the levels seen in 2017 and earlier.
Taking a look at the search volume by country for the past 12 months, Google Trends reveals that the countries with the greatest interest in froyo were: #1) United States, #2) Canada, #3) Australia, #4) Greece, #5) Ireland. The same three countries in the same order were the top 3 in 2020. Ireland replaced Singapore in the top 5. Interestingly, when we look at where new froyo shops are opening, the growth is greater in Central America and Asia.
During the most recent 12 months, these were the most popular frozen yogurt related queries worldwide:
Keep in mind that regional interest represents a proportion of all search queries, not the absolute query count. Interest remains the highest in the US. Going back over five years, the top 3 countries in terms of interest in frozen yogurt remained the same: #1 United States, #2 Canada, #3 Australia. Since people use Google to search for frozen yogurt near them (by far the most popular search query), it makes sense that people search for frozen yogurt more often in countries with more frozen yogurt shops.
The patterns of search traffic for frozen yogurt are similar in the US (compared to worldwide search traffic) but they show a slightly stronger recovery this year than the worldwide figures. This is also likely due to the coronavirus pandemic, since conditions have improved in the US.
Taking a closer look at US search traffic over the past 12 months, Google Trends reveals that frozen yogurt was searched the most often in the following states:
Recall that the search volume is measured as a proportion of all queries in the state, so even though California is larger and has more froyo shops, it still ranks third. Idaho was also #1 in 2020, while Arizona fell from #2 in 2020 to #5 in 2019. The trend shows a move towards the Mountain states, away from the coasts.
And what are people searching for? Google Trends reveals that they are searching for the same thing people all over the world are searching for, yogurt near me and frozen yogurt near me.
The impact of the coronavirus pandemic was long-lasting. Quite a few froyo shops were closed for extended periods of time. Some closed for good. Recovery is not going to be quick due to the severity of the pandemic.
