Declining Skin Care Trends: The Secrets That Google Searches Reveal About Skin Care Trends

In our last post, we highlighted some of the key findings from our Key Insights Report summarizing Google’s Beauty Trends report. This post will focus on declining trends – those keywords that have been losing volume either in a sustained way over the last few years, seasonally or rapidly (these latter terms are dubbed “falling stars” by Google).

Here’s a breakdown of the three categories of declining terms included in Google’s report:

• Declining trends which Google calls “sustained decliners” – popularity for these terms has been declining steadily over the last few years.
• Seasonal decliners are terms that typically spike around the holidays but are decreasing in demand each year.
• Falling stars are terms that have started declining rapidly in popularity (e.g., they’ve reached their peak)

A summary of what’s no longer cool in skin care

Declining terms show lower search volume collectively and individually. The time frame for Google’s study was 2014 through 2016 so, as with our summary of rising terms, we consulted 7 Google Trends to see if these terms were still declining in 2017 and 2018.

Here are the top declining terms in each of the three categories listed above.

• The term “olive oil for skin” is the top sustained decliner with 5400 searchs/month
• “Almond oil for skin” ranks as the to top seasonal decliner with 4,400 searches/month
• “Skin bleaching” is the top “falling star.” With 22,200 searches/month, this term has the  highest volume of searches among falling stars, hitting its peak in the summer of 2016, but has since declined (except for less spectacular seasonal spikes in June and July).

As with the rising trend terms, we augmented Google’s data by including the average monthly searches for each term listed in the report. We used Google’s keyword tool to get volume estimates for all the terms profiled in the report.

How you can use this information

Skin Care and beauty marketers may want to evaluate the keywords they’re bidding on to see if they can reduce bids or reallocate budget from decliners to rising terms. But we don’t advise you to remove declining terms completely, at least not while people are still searching for the products or ingredients on the “decliners” list. Knowing what terms are falling out of favor – and thus losing volume – is also helpful when setting expectations for your campaign’s performance over the coming holiday season and beyond.

For more detailed information about declining terms in all three categories, download our key insights report.