Evaluating the Effectiveness of Health Awareness Events by Google Search Frequency

TL;DR

This study assesses the impact of health awareness events on public attention by analyzing Google search trends, finding that some events significantly increase search interest while others do not.

Contribution

It introduces a statistical framework to evaluate the effectiveness of health awareness events using Google Trends data from 2004 to 2017.

Findings

10 events significantly increased search interest

28 events showed no significant effect

The analysis used Transfer Function Noise modeling, Wilcoxon test, and Binomial inference

Abstract

Over two hundreds health awareness events take place in the United States in order to raise attention and educate the public about diseases. It would be informative and instructive for the organization to know the impact of these events, although such information could be difficult to measure. Here 46 events are selected and their data from 2004 to 2017 are downloaded from Google Trend(GT). We investigate whether the events effectively attract the public attention by increasing the search frequencies of certain keywords which we call queries. Three statistical methods including Transfer Function Noise modeling, Wilcoxon Rank Sum test, and Binomial inference are conducted on 46 GT data sets. Our study show that 10 health awareness events are effective with evidence of a significant increase in search frequencies in the event months, and 28 events are ineffective, with the rest being classified as unclear.