Nowcasting Credit Demand in Turkey With Google Trends Data

Age of Big Data and internet has brought variety of opportunities for social researchers on identifying on-going social trends instantly. As internet user base grew exponentially, major internet content search companies have begun to offer data mining products which could extract attitude of on-going trends and identify new trends on web as well. Since 2009, as a pioneer on these web analytics solutions Google has launched Google Trends service, which enables to researchers to examine change of trend on specific keywords. We use weekly Google Trends Index of “General Purpose Loan” (GT) and total out-standing volume of Turkish banking system from the data period of first week of March 2011 to second week of September 2014. In this paper we test whether the Google Analytics search index series can be used as a consistent forecaster of national general purpose loan (GPL] demand in Turkey. We show how to use search engine data to forecast Turkish GPL demand. The results show that Google search query data is successful at nowcasting GPL demand