AdWords Keyword Tool: Is It Accurate?
Posted by: Ronny Talmor in Advertising, tags: AdvertisingA couple of weeks ago, the Internet marketing world had been hit by what seemed to be wonderful news: Google AdWords Keyword Tool started showing actual numbers instead of vague graphs for search volume.
I have received a lot of emails from newsletters I subscribe to, informing me of the great change. One of the senders was excited enough to conclude: “it probably spells the end for services like Wordtracker.” A famous guru could not hide his joy: “Holy cow! Talk about shaking up the planet!”
The famous keyword research guru, Jim Morris, dedicated a post on his blog (nichbot.com) to the Keyword Tool revolution: “All of a sudden - there is no longer any confusion about how many times people are searching for a certain keyword phrase on Google.com.”
Mr. Morris included in his post a screenshot of 8 results the Tool returned when he had asked for keyword suggestions for the term “blogging.” Here they are: blogging, blogs, blog, blogging software, radio blog, pink is the new blog, blog search, bad girls blog. Three columns follow the keywords list: Advertiser Competition, Approx Search Volume for last month, and Approx Average Search Volume.
Up to July 2008, the Competition column and the two Search Volume columns were using shaded bars, which were supposed to indicate relative volumes, i.e. the more shaded the bar the higher the volume. Since the change was made, the 2 Search Volume columns show actual numbers, but the Advertiser Competition volume is still represented by a shaded bar.
I went through the suggestions Jim Morris got for “blogging” and checked a couple of them. For instance, the Advertiser Competition bar next to “radio blog” is painted 3/4 green. Looks like quite a lot of bidders on this keyword, doesn’t it? One expects to find a lot of ads when “radio blog” is searched. Well, not necessarily. There is not even one ad for “radio blog” (at least there were none on 7/8/2008, when the blog was published and I conducted my search). Not in the U.S. nor in the UK or Canada.
The same thing happened when I tried “bad girls blog.” The shaded bar is painted half green, perhaps indicating moderate competition (As you can see, it is hard to know what it actually indicates. The question is: why doesn’t Google reveal the real number of bidders on each keyword? Why is it a secret in the first place?) At any event, you expect some competition when the bar is half green, don’t you? But again, there is not even one ad for “bad girls blog” in all the English speaking countries.
You may ask “what is the problem? Don’t use Google if you don’t like it.” Well, the problem is that Google is not just a search engine. Google charged its advertisers over 16 billion dollars last year alone, and an advertiser must rely on the data Google provides him or her in order to set up a good campaign. If these data are extremely inaccurate, there is a good chance most AdWords advertisers are spending their money in vain.
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