The deadline for the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation compliance is fast approaching, resulting in increased searches for the acronym “GDPR” on Google’s search engine. This organic search increase has prompted companies like Adobe and IBM — which offer consulting services — to buy up search terms, driving up the price of keywords.
Since April 2017, searches for the keyword “GDPR” rose 160%, from 22,200 searches in April 2017 to 201,000 in March 2018, according to Google Trends data.
Companies are changing the way they do business to comply with GDPR privacy regulations, and this will directly impact marketers, said Sameer Mohan, analyst at iQuanti.
iQuanti, a data-driven digital marketing agency, also found that searches between January 2018 and March 2018 rose 39% as interest spreads from marketers and businesses to the general public. Searches grew from 135,000 in January 2018 to 201,000 in March 2018, Mohan said, citing the Google Trends data.
Searches for “GDPR compliance” also grew during the past year, rising 143% between April 2017 and March 2018. In April 2017, there were 3,600 searches for “GDPR compliance,” compared with 22,200 searches in March 2018.
Other popular searches around GDPR include “GDPR requirements” and “what is GDPR”, which garnered 18,100 and 12,100 searches in March 2018, respectively. “GDPR requirements” saw an increase in searches of 179% from April 2017, while “what is GDPR” jumped 172% during the same time period.