Is an ageing population shrinking the market? We checked the search data.

The question

The brand sells electric ride-on cars, tractors, quads and spare parts for children. Business was growing, but the CEO had a long-term worry: the population is getting older and fewer children are born every year. If the category is slowly shrinking, today’s growth hides a problem.

That is a strategic question, not an ads question. But the ad platforms hold the best public record of what people are looking for, so we used it.

What we built

We built a research workflow that sizes a shop’s whole market, category by category and country by country, then joins it to the account.

1. Scope from the account. Google’s own product taxonomy showed what the shop really sells, so we sized those categories instead of everything in the menu.
2. Pull the demand. Keyword Planner returned 48 months of search volume and entry bids for broad keyword sets in Czech, Slovak and Polish.
3. Clean it. Near-identical queries (with and without diacritics, singular and plural) were merged, leaving 26,156 unique keywords in 15 categories.
4. Normalise. Every category is compared with its own market’s average, so a general drop in reported volume does not read as a dying category.
5. Join to the account. Demand sits next to the shop’s clicks, revenue and impression share, month by month.

The CEO received it as three pages: a written report, an explorer to compare categories down to single keywords, and a demand-versus-account dashboard.

Why the raw data misled

Read literally, the data confirmed the fear. Search volume for electric ride-on cars in Czechia fell 36% over three years. Most categories were below zero year over year.

But the drop was everywhere, including in products that have nothing to do with birth rates. Mops fell. Wicker laundry baskets fell. Genuine demand does not fall evenly across unrelated products in three countries at once.

The account settled it. Over the same period, like-for-like revenue rose 35% year over year while reported demand for the main category fell 17%. Demand and revenue cannot really move in opposite directions that far. The reported decline is largely a quirk of how Keyword Planner reports volumes over time.

So we stopped reading raw percentages and measured each category against its market’s average instead.

What is actually growing

Measured against the market, the picture changes. The core ride-on categories are roughly in line with it. Quads and buggies beat it by 28 to 42 points in every country.

Two differences between neighbouring markets stood out. Electric tractors and ride-on cars are slipping behind the market in Czechia but running ahead of it in Slovakia. And spare parts are growing in Poland while shrinking at home.

Winning share in a flat market

If the category was not collapsing, why was revenue growing so fast? Because the shop was taking a bigger slice of it. We measured capture: the shop’s ad clicks divided by all searches in the category. Impression share only covers the auctions you already enter; capture covers the whole market.

This is the answer to the original question. Even if fewer children were born, a brand doubling its share of demand is nowhere near the ceiling. And the fastest-growing category also appeals to older children, which widens the age range the brand can sell to.

The same analysis showed something missing: there was no real search campaign in the account. We included a starting structure of 127 ad groups, one per category, country and funnel stage, with starting bids.

When the demand peaks

The same four years of monthly data answer a planning question the team had only ever answered from memory. Indexed so that 100 is an average month, Czech demand for the core categories sits at 67 in January and February, climbs through spring, and peaks at 120 in November.

December drops back below average. A ride-on car is a large item, and by December it is too late for one to arrive in time, so this is a November business, not a December one. Budget and stock need to be in place before the peak, not during it. The last chart in the explorer above shows the full curve.

Where to expand next

The CEO had written Poland off: other shops he knew had struggled there. The data made a case for a second look.

Low entry bids do not guarantee an easy market. Polish retail often runs on thin margins, and the price level of competitors needs checking before any launch. But on search demand and cost to be seen, Poland is not the market to rule out.

The same study can be run for any country on the shortlist, so the next-market decision can compare like with like.

What changed

The analysis did not come with a campaign to launch. Its job was to make a strategic conversation concrete, and it did:

• The demographic worry got an answer. The market is not shrinking in the way the raw data suggested, and the brand is gaining share.
• It confirmed a product direction the team was already working on, which gave the CEO more confidence in the rest of the findings.
• Poland went back on the list of candidate markets.
• Search became a real option, with a structure to start from.

“Interesting, it really made me think. Poland surprised me, I had written it off automatically. A lot of this confirms what I see, which makes me trust the other findings enough to test them properly.”
The CEO, replying to the report (translated from Czech)

This is one of the workflows we build for clients. See what else we could build for your team.