AdWords Keyword Tool: Is It Accurate?
The Internet Marketing world received what seemed like very good news: as of July 2008, the AdWords Keyword Tool is showing actual search volumes instead of shaded green bars.
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.
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.
Same is true for “bad girls blog.” The mystery bar is half green, which might indicate moderate competition (Actually, nobody knows what it really indicates. Why doesn’t Google tell us the exact number of bidders on a certain keyword? What’s the big secret?) Anyway, one would expect at least some competition when Google paints the bar half green, right? Wrong again! Not even one ad in all the English speaking countries (I confess I didn’t try India).
If Google were just a search engine, that wouldn’t be a problem at all. But Google sells its AdWords services to hundreds of thousands of people, who have to rely on the data supplied to them by Google in order to set up smart and profitable campaigns. If these data are incorrect, chances are many thousands of advertisers spend a fortune in vain.
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