Author: Ronny Talmor
AdWords Keyword Tool: Is It Accurate?
Thursday, July 31st, 2008 @ 3:46 am
A 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.
Emails were sent to all the marketing and advertising mailing lists, giving their subscribers the good news. One of these emails predicted that “it probably spells the end for services like Wordtracker.” A well-known guru expressed his excitement: “Holy cow! Talk about shaking up the planet!”
Jim Morris, a keyword research authority, posted the following on his nichbot.com blog: “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.”
Jim Morris published a screenshot of keywords suggested by the Tool when “blogging” was searched. These are the first 8: blogging, blogs, blog, blogging software, radio blog, pink is the new blog, blog search, bad girls blog. Except for the keywords column there are 3 more columns: Advertiser Competition, Approx Search Volume for last month, and Approx Average Search Volume.
Until July 2008, all three columns used to show a shaded bar, which was supposed to indicate the relative volumes, i.e. if the bar was completely green it supposedly indicated very high volume; half green equaled moderate volume etc. But now, the two search volume columns show actual numerical figures, while the first column, Advertiser Competition, still shows this shaded bar.
One of the keyword suggestions Jim Morris got was “radio blog.” The Competition bar next to this keyword is 3/4 green, representing what looks like quite a lot of competition, right? I strongly suggest you search google.com for “radio blog.” You’ll be surprised to discover there is not even one ad! (Well, perhaps by now there are a couple). Neither when you use broad search nor when you use phrase; neither in the United States nor in Canada or the UK.
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.
It wouldn’t be so bad if Google were just a search engine. But Google charges millions of people billions of dollars for AdWords, and a smart advertiser has to rely on the data that Google gives them to make intelligent decisions regarding his/her advertising campaign. If these data are extremely inaccurate, there is a good chance that most advertisers who use AdWords are pouring a fortune into Google’s pockets to no avail.
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