Monday, July 28, 2014

Predicting iPhone sales with Google Trends

With the paper "Predicting the Present" by Hal Varian and Hyunyoung Choi in mind, i plotted  average quarterly Google searches for "iPhone" against quarterly sales. The results seem to indicate that Google searches is a leading indicator of sales by one quarter, although the correlation is not perfect.

On request, here is a scatteprlot of the two variables. The quarterly change in average Google searches is on the x-axis and quarterly change in iPhone sales is on the y-axis. In the first graph, there is no lag and the relatoinship is negative. If SVI preceeds sales with one quarter there is a positive relationship.

What could this data say about the Apple Watch? It doesn't look good.



3 comments:

Unknown said...
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Anonymous said...

Scatter plot would be useful...

ErikJJ said...

I've added one to the post.

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