Test Driving The AdWords Keyword Tool

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."

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.

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 next keyword phrase I checked was "bad girls blog." The mysterious bar is 50% green, representing more than light competition (Or does it? Nobody knows what it actually represents. The question is, why is it a secret? Why doesn't Google tell its customers the exact volume of competition?) Anyway, in the case of "bad girls blog," again, there is not even one ad in 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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