Can You Trust The AdWords Keyword Tool?

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 also published a screenshot of the 8 first results he got when he searched for keywords suggestions for “blogging” on AdWords Keyword Tool. The keywords are: blogging, blogs, blog, blogging software, radio blog, pink is the new blog, blog search, bad girls blog; then it shows 3 columns: Advertiser Competition, Approx Search Volume for last month, and Approx Average Search Volume.

Prior to July 2008, these 3 columns showed a shaded green bar, which somehow represented the volumes, i.e. if the bar was fully shaded it must have indicated very high volume; an empty bar indicated no competition etc. Now, the columns of search volume include actual numbers, while the Advertiser Competition column still shows shaded bars.

I checked the results Jim Morris got when searching “blogging.” The Advertiser Competition bar next to the keyword “radio blog” is 3/4 green - looks like a lot of competition, doesn’t it? Well, why don’t you search Google for “radio blog?” There must be tens of ads for that keyword, right? Wrong! Not even one ad! Neither when you use broad nor when you use phrase, neither in the U.S. nor in the UK nor in Canada (on 7/8/2008).

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.