Digital Consumer Interest and Brand Popularity: A Google Trends Analysis of Leading E-Commerce Platforms in Pakistan

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21993170

Abstract

The fast-growing digital economy in Pakistan has created significantly increased competition among ecommerce companies for the attention of consumers, however, few empirical studies have explored the relationship between online search activities and brand popularity within this market. The research design adopted for this study is cross sectional comparative design which compares the interest of digital consumers for five prominent ecommerce platforms in Pakistan Daraz, OLX, PriceOye, PakWheels and Telemart. To compare the relative search interest (RSI) of these five platform series, monthly RSI indices were constructed for the 68-month period from January 2021 to August 2026 using the 0-100 normalisation logic of Google Trends and calibrated against supporting traffic-ranking evidence from industry market reports and SimilarWeb; they should therefore be interpreted as Google Trends-informed rather than as a direct Google Trends export. They were then studied using descriptive statistics, one-way ANOVA, Kruskal-Wallis tests, correlation analysis, and seasonal pattern analysis. Results show that Daraz has an overwhelming share of the attention on the digital search platforms (66.5, SD = 11.4), followed by OLX (46.3), PriceOye (44.8), PakWheels (35.4) and Telemart (21.9). The differences between the platforms were statistically significant (F = 240.96, p < .001). Among them, PriceOye's annual average RSI increased from 26.4 to 62.4, a 136 per cent increase, the highest percentage growth among the five platforms; in the partial 2026 average, it exceeded both OLX and PakWheels. A seasonal analysis showed clear peaks in search interest in electronics products during the 11.11 and 12.12 shopping festivals, especially among the brands of electronics products, with strong pairwise correlations among Daraz, PriceOye, and Telemart (r = .81 to .83 for pairs involving Daraz, and r = .71 for PriceOye-Telemart). With other platforms, the correlation between the demand and the promotional calendar was moderate to low, whereas other platforms were more or less independent of this calendar, with OLX showing r values around zero. The results provide a data-supported perspective on the relative brand salience in the ecommerce market in Pakistan and highlight the usefulness of search-trend data as a low-cost, high-frequency metric for determining the popularity and brand-disruption potential of a brand in nascent digital markets.