Trends in US Searches for Disc Golf
Analysis of the volume of Google searches in the United States during 2010-2024 for terms for disc golf
This is the first in a series of posts that will evaluate using data from Google Trends for the volume of Google searches that include terms for disc golf to predict the growth of disc golf. For purposes of the analysis, I am going to adopt, as a measure of disc golf growth, the most common measure used for the level of participation in a sport, which is the number of people who have played the sport in the past year. The hypothesis is that the volume of Google searches reflects the level of interest in the sport by both existing and potential participants and that an increase in search volume will be reflected in faster growth in the number of disc golf participants, while a decrease in the level of search volume will be reflected in slower, or perhaps negative, growth in the number of disc golf participants.
This initial post analyzes the data for the volume of Google searches in the United States during 2010-2024 for terms for disc golf.
As a preliminary matter, an important note about interpreting the search volume data provided by Google Trends: the search volume data provided by Google Trends do not show the actual number of searches for a term that were made in a specified place during a specified time period; rather, they based on the estimated percentage of searches that contained that term that were made in the specified place during the specified time period of the total searches that were made in that place during that time period (based on a random sampling of searches), which is then expressed as percentage of the highest estimated percentage of searches that contained that term that were made in that place at any time during the time period. As example, if we requested that Google Trends provide us with the search volume data for the search term “widget” in the US during 2010-2012 and the sampling data indicated that 0.00001% of all searches made in the US in March 2010 contained the term “widget”, while the highest estimated search volume percentage for “widget” in the US in any month in 2010-2012 was 0.00002% of all searches in September 2011, Google Trends would provide a search volume value for the search term “widget” of 50 for March 2010 (indicating the estimated search percentage for that month was 50% of the maximum search percentage for any month in 2010-2012) and a value of 100 for September 2011 (indicating that the estimated search percentage for that month as 100% of the maximum search percentage in 2010-2012). (For Google’s explanation of this, see “Understanding the Numbers” in Basics of Google Trends.)
With that out of the way, back to the problem at hand.
Based on the data shown in Google Trends, the most popular terms for disc golf over the past 14 years in the United States have been, in order, “disc golf”, “frisbee golf”, “disk golf”, “discgolf” and “frolf”, with “disc golf” by far the most commonly used term, “frisbee golf” much less used and falling in popularity, and “discgolf” and “frolf” having minimal usage. Set forth below is a chart showing the average monthly volumes of Google searches on the web in the US that included those five terms for each year from 2010 to 2024. (The numbers on the left scale are the percentage that the average monthly search volume for a year represented of the all-time highest monthly search volume that included any of the terms during the time period (which happened to be “disc golf” in July 2022).)
To get a measure of the search volume in the US for the sport of disc golf, regardless of which term was used, I summed the data for each of the five terms. Set forth below is a chart showing the average monthly volume of Google searches on the web in the US for each year from 2010 to 2024 that included any of the five terms for disc golf. (The left scale is the same as for the prior chart.)
As can be seen, the average monthly volume of searches in the US that included any of the five terms for disc golf was fairly flat from 2010 to 2019, increased dramatically from 2019 to 2021, and has declined significantly since then.
The chart below adds a line that shows what the average monthly volume of searches in the US from 2010 to 2024 would have been had it increased from 2010 to 2024 on the trendline from 2010 to 2019.
As can be seen, despite the precipitous dropoff from 2021, the volume of searches in 2024 was still above what it would have been had the volume of searches merely continued to increase from 2019 to 2024 on the trendline from 2010 to 2019.
For those interested in some of the details of the analysis and the rationale behind some of the choices I made, please see footnote 1 below.1
In the next post, I will analyze the data for the volume of Google searches for terms for disc golf worldwide.
(A) Google Trends allows you to get search data for “topics” as well as specific search terms. Analyzing the search volume for the topic “disc golf” might, in theory, have been preferable to analyzing the search volume for specific terms for disc golf, as the data for the topic would include not only searches for the exact term but also searches with misspellings and various language translations. (See Google Trends - Basics.) However, the disc golf topic on Google Trends does not currently appear to be providing correct data and is, for example, showing zero search volume for 2017 to 2019 and very suspect data for years thereafter. (B) Google Trends allows you to limit the data for a search term to searches within a particular category, such as Sports, which is useful in cases where a search term might be used in multiple contexts. (See Google Trends - Basics.) However, since the terms for disc golf are only used in the context of the sport disc golf, I decided not limit the data to searches in the category of Sports. (C) Although Google Trends provides date back to 2004, I chose to use 2010 through 2024 as the time range, as the Google Trends data for search volume for terms for disc golf prior to 2010 seemed suspect in some cases, probably due to low search volume causing sampling issues. (D) In the search term field on Google Trends, I enclosed the search terms in quotations marks to avoid (the unlikely event of) including searches where the words just happened to be used in the same search rather than together in the specified order. (E) The data from Google Trends was for monthly search volume. Since disc golf search volume turns out to be highly seasonal (a lot more searches in the summer than the winter), for most of the analyses, I averaged the monthly data to get average yearly data.