With any luck, you’ll have heard the DAB digital radio adverts on Absolute Radio. You may well have heard the same adverts on other stations. And you may have seen or heard similar promos on BBC radio and television.

So the question is: has it worked? Has there been a massive surge of sales of digital radio sets?

Today’s on 18 December and the final sales figures won’t be in until early in the New Year. So we don’t yet know whether or not the credit crunch has affected sales.

But Google Trends is always worth looking at.

You may need to click on the image above to see if full size, but it uses the data from Google Trends to show how DAB has been searched over the last three years. What’s immediately clear is that come December, people start searching for DAB radio information, or looking for places to buy. Only the first week of December’s included in this data, but with the main burst of DAB advertising activity happening right now, and ahead of this week’s forthcoming publication of the Digital Radio Working Group’s report into the future of digital radio in the UK (More about that when it’s published).