If you are going to online market an HR Information System (HRIS) software or HR Management software application, it’s important to know in which months of the year the most and the least people are performing their research. The information I present in this article is based on results shown from Google Adwords and from boardreader.com. If you want to confirm these results, take a look at the same sources I have.
If you have a Google Adwords account, access the keyword tool to see a small bar graph which shows the average monthly searches performed for your particular keyword. To the left of the bar graph, the tool also shows the top searched month. Below, I have shown a few of the top used keywords for our industry and shown what Google Adwords presented.
Keyword Top Month Lowest Months
• HR software March July & August
• HR System March Dec
• Small Business HRIS August Nov, & Dec
• HRIS software November Feb & April
• Human Resources Software March August, Sept. & Oct.
• HRIS October May & Dec.
• HRMS November Feb. & April
• HRIS Payroll August Jan, March & June
• HRIS Vendor March August & Sept.
• HRMS Vendor March Nov. & Dec.
To see when prospects are asking about HRIS, HRMS or HR software applications on thousands of boards and forums, also take a look at boardreader.com. They have some extremely helpful charts and graphs that show when people type in certain terms in online message boards. The only limit is that it tracks data for the past six months but not for a year. Here are the results for the past six months for our keywords used above.
Keyword Top Month Lowest Month
• HR Software January, February December
• HR System January December
• Small business HRIS no data
• HRIS software February April, May
• Human Resources Software May June
• HRIS February May March
• HRMS February May
• Payroll Software February December & January
• HRIS Vendor no data
• HRMS vendor no data
So what should all of this tell us? First, under the board reader results, the top months for our keywords all fell in the first quarter. It looks to me like many finished year end payroll processing and immediately went online asking about other systems. As for the Google Adword searches, it appears as if those systems’ keywords which suggest payroll have the highest traffic from August to November, while HR only products tend to see a busier spring.
I started out tracking the data in this report for my own benefit but then thought some of our vendors might find it interesting, as well. Let me know if you have any questions.
About the Author
Clay Scroggin worked in the Human Resource and Payroll Software Industry for more than 15 years. During that time, Clay, and those who worked with him, assisted hundreds of HR professionals with their HR software needs. In 2007, Clay began working on CompareHRIS.com, a site dedicated to assisting HR professionals with their search, selection, implementation and use of HR systems. The site contains several tools to assist HR professionals with their HR software research including an HRIS Selection Tool.
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