What's happened to Japanese Overture tool?

It no longer gives information on popular terms

[whats up skip]

The Overture suggestion tool no longer helps with information on popular terms like "Australia" or "Cairns" in Japanese.

Any ideas what is going on here?

Surely people would want to bid on terms such as "Cairns"?

[bill]

Maybe you're not spelling it right ;)

I see plenty of results for those keywords in Japanese on the Overture keyword suggestion tool [inventory.jp.overture.com]

[whats up skip]

Grrrrr

Ok, now it works for Cairns, but it still does not give a frequency for "Australia". Sure it does for hundreds of different combinations, but not the root term.

[bill]

Overture Japan switches the results of the keyword suggestion tool generally within the first 10 days of the month (to show the previous month's keyword data). Maybe you're catching some of the change-over?

[Woz]

>but it still does not give a frequency for "Australia".

It may be that no enough people using Overture JP search on the Australia alone, but rather phrases like "Holiday in Australia" or some such similar. I have noticed the same situation on Overture US where a search for, say, Widgets, will produce search counts for all sorts of widgets, blue, green, red, but not for widgets alone. This may be the same situation.

Have you garnered search counts for similar phrases from the other Overtures amd do you use them when creating content for the Japanese market?

Onya
Woz

[bill]

Woz has a good point here. I took a look for Australia and understand what your frustration is now. Despite the fact that we're only looking at the first month of full Overture Japan data (arguable), you might be seeing that Japanese searchers are more savvy for certain keyword terms. Instead of single word searches they are entering keyword combinations thinking that they'll get more focused results.

Do you have comparable data from AdWords for the same keywords?

[whats up skip]

I have not checked Adwords.

In December "Australia" was the top term I came across. I don't think in just one month that the Japanese public would have completely changed their way of searching.

If you look at say "Cairns" the root word alone is almost 10 times more popular than any combination with the root word.

[bill]

One other option I could suggest would be to contact the Overture Japan staff to ask them whether something is wrong. They may be working some kinks out of the keyword suggestion tool, or maybe there is a glitch.