Keeping Up With the Bubble Tea (and Others) on Google in 2020
By: Jim Meng Kok
Tags: Data Analysis, Data Visualization, Google Trends, Data, R

Background

Indeed, time flies as the unspeakably bad year is going to end. Let’s hope 2021 will be a better year of recovery for everyone!

During 2020, Bubble Tea was one of the hottest mentions in Singapore. It was raised from Google Search to the e-commerce platform, i.e. Shopee.

What’s trending on Google Search based in Singapore in 2020? (Souce: Google Trends)

Based on Singapore’s Google Trends in 2020, Bubble tea delivery was the second most trending topic for deliveries and How to make bubble tea was in the top 5 of “Trending How-Tos”. This has clearly shown that the people in Singapore loves bubble tea (Baker, 2020), especially during the introduction of the Circuit Breaker in Singapore to curb the COVID-19 pandemic.

Top 12 products of 2020 in the Southeast Asia and Taiwan regions (Source: Shopee)

Furthermore, during Shopee’s 12.12 Birthday Sale, Shopee also mentioned that Bubble Tea is the most popular product in Singapore (Shopee, 2020).

In this exercise, visualizations of the bubble tea brands that were searched in Singapore on Google in 2020 will be shown. Furthermore, according to the above Shopee’s infographic, visualizations of each region’s respective popular product (i.e. Air Fryer, Bluetooth Earphones, Body Lotion, Powdered Milk, Bubble Tea, Nintendo Switch, and Milo) that were searched on Google in 2020 will be shown. You can get the codes with steps of this exercise on my GitHub repository.

Data used

As there are about 60+ bubble tea brands in Singapore (Leong, 2020) and gtrendsR package from R can only be able to crawl up to 5 keywords from Google Trends, Google Form was created and sent out to my friends to complete a survey with only one question that asked them what are the 5 bubble tea brands that are found in Singapore that came into their mind. There are 25 responses.

Google Form survey on the 5 Bubble Tea Brands that came into their mind, Image by Author

First 9 responses of the 25 responses from the Google Form survey, Image by Author

After conduct data cleaning (i.e. lowercase conversion, splitting the comma delimiters, and removing the leading & trailing spaces) using Python on the responses given, the following is the output of the results.

Results of the bubble tea brands given by my 25 friends, Image by Author

Based on the sample data, we can infer that the top 5 bubble tea brands in Singapore that came to our minds are:

Koi (Appearance: 25) LiHo (Appearance: 21) Gong Cha (Appearance: gong cha — 11, gongcha — 9; Total: 20) CHICHA San Chen (Appearance: chi cha — 4, chichasanchen — 3, chi cha san chen — 2, chicha — 2, chicha sanchen — 1; Total: 11) R&B Tea (Appearance: 6)

Since both Gong Cha and CHICHA San Chen have different forms of interpreting, the individual term from each of both brands that has the highest value (gong cha and chi cha respectively) will be used in the keyword the parameter of gtrends of the gtrendsR package.

Visualizing Bubble Tea Brands Searches

After retrieving the Google Trends data of koi, liho, gong cha, chi cha, and r&b tea through gtrendsR package, a list of data is given.

Tidy & Transform process was conducted to retrieve interest_over_time dataframe from the data list. The process also helped to ensure the hits variable (search interest in a given term, indexed to 100) from interest_over_time dataframe in a numeric format as well as creating new variables (i.e. year , month , and new_date ) that are derived from the date variable ( dttm format) of the interest_over_time dataframe.

By plotting new_date variable ( date format of date variable) in the x-axis and the hits on the y-axis, sparklines visualization is created to allow users to have immediate trending information for the bubble tea brands that were searched on Singapore’s Google in 2020. By hovering over any point on a line, you can see the date ( new_date ) and the search volume ( hits ) corresponding to your hover position.

In April — the first month of the two-month Circuit Breaker, there is an increasing trend for all the bubble tea brands except for CHICHA San Chen, which has a consistent trend instead. There is a possibility that this period has led to many people who wanted to get their bubble tea fix by ordering their favourite bubble tea through delivery. Thereafter, the trend starts to decrease in May for all the bubble tea brands except for Gong Cha. This is probably due to the closure of the bubble tea shops during the Circuit Breaker (Kurohi, 2020).