Which Valentine’s Gift Does Your State Google More Than Any Other? — We Have the Answers
Chocolate & jewelry & flowers, oh my! Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, and with it comes the desire to shower our loved ones with romantic gifts and gestures. It turns out, what people consider the ideal gift depends on where you live, and every state favors a different item. Whether you are pulling out all the stops or just settling in for a cozy night, no Valentine’s Day is complete without a bit of giving.
To help you find the best gift for your special someone, we analyzed Google search data for the most popular Valentine’s Day items and rounded up the gift that every state searches for more than the rest of the country. We know that every love is unique, and the gift loved most by your state is unique, too!
Our Favorite Findings:
- Northern states look for Champagne and Bourbon on Valentine’s Day — the Midwest hunts for gourmet gift baskets.
- Food gifts are most popular; 42% of the country opts for chocolate, candy, cakes or edible arrangements on Valentine’s Day.
- The Southeast sleuths out lingerie, perfume and personal care products while the West Coast grabs all the chocolate and candy they can get their hands on.
- 1 in 5 people opt for jewelry gifts on Valentine’s Day; the same goes for chocolate.
- Jewelry searches concentrate in the Central U.S., forming a “diamond belt” that stretches from Illinois to Utah.
- New Mexico looks for flowers substantially more than any other state, crowding out the top spot for nearly every search in this category.
- What do the opposite ends of the East Coast have in common? Florida and Maine look for greeting cards the most on Valentine’s Day — nearly 3X more than any other state.
- Texas loves conversation heart candies more than anyone, searching for the treats 150% more than the runner-up. In fact, they search for Valentine’s candy generally more than anyone.
Shop the best Valentine’s Day gifts!
Which Valentine’s Day item is your state more obsessed with than any other state?
We gathered over 3,300 Google Trends data points for this analysis, revealing some surprising regional differences in Valentine’s Day consumer behavior.
Fun Facts:
- While they don’t grab the top spot for any single alcoholic item, Missouri has the highest combined searches of all alcohol products around Valentine’s Day.
- The states looking for candy the least on Valentine’s Day include Alaska, Mississippi, North and South Dakota, Vermont and West Virginia.
- The U.S. hardly searches for Valentine’s cards, suggesting people mainly purchase these at brick-and-mortar locations.
- The Cheese Brothers may be in Wisconsin, but California takes the lead in searches for their cheesy gifts.
- Virginians love their food gifts like cakes, fruit baskets and edible arrangements; they search for the stuff over 40% more than the next state.
- The states least likely to give food gifts on Valentine’s Day include Hawaii, Idaho, Kansas, Montana and Nebraska.
- Connecticut not only wins the top search for Journelle lingerie — they search for undergarments during the holiday more than any other state.
- The states that search for lingerie the least include Wyoming, Delaware, New Hampshire, Indiana and Oregon.
Dive In:
The table below breaks down Valentine’s Day searches for all 50 states where you can compare favorite brands and items from the map above.
Methodology
This article’s visualizations and analysis were created using Google Trends direct data export for the two weeks leading up to and on Valentine’s Day 2021 (2/1/21-2/14/21). Wishlisted compiled search interest by region for every U.S. state for 65 popular Valentine’s Day items to determine where each item is most popular. Our Google Trends data was exported between 1/25/22-1/28/22. Every search we performed in this analysis included a specific, nationally available brand to find where each state is buying its favorite Valentine’s Day items.
It took 65 Valentine’s Day item searches to find an item that every state in the country searches for most. The 65 search keywords, in addition to all the raw data behind this project, can be downloaded (from Google Drive) here.
Google Trends calculates popularity by region using a scale of 0 to 100, where 100 is the area with the most popularity as a proportion of total searches in that state. A winning state has a higher proportion of searches for a Valentine’s Day item, not a higher absolute query count. Google Trends data is based on a random sample of searches representative of all Google searches. It does not use every search made during a specified query timeframe — providing the whole data set would be too large to process. Therefore, it is possible to obtain varying results for the same query. To combat this, we pulled multiple queries for the same item over four days to ensure a product’s top popularity.
Excel, Flourish, and Google Trends were the tools used to analyze and create data visualizations for this article.
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