Adwords CPCs vs. Overture Bid Tool

Are they inherently out-of-wack?

[pdivi]

Google's traffic estimator has never worked very well for me in estimating CPCs, so I have been trying to use the Overture bid tool to predict the costs of clicks on Adwords. Well, that's not working very well either. I have found that niche industrial products have higher CPCs on the Overture bid tool, and terms for common consumer items have higher CPCs on Google. ...and the discrepancy is pretty huge.

I have a feeling I'm overlooking a very obvious difference between the two networks. Can someone elighten me?

[premier teague]

The fact is that both "tracking" systems are innacurate to the extreme.

For example ignore ANY stats you got from overture during April 04, as they had technical issues that they admitted made their figures wrong!

Only use these tracking features as a guide. For that they are very useful, but I would always advise anyone to use a back-end tracking system independant of either google or overture.

[Robsp]

The actual CPC on Adwords tends to be more volatile as it is also CTR dependent. Hence the forecast tools don't really work. Just test it for a few days and you have all info you need...

[shorebreak]

In our experience with over 1M keywords across many clients, Google's traffic estimator is 30%+ inaccurate 70% of the time = mostly useless for traffic estimation.

[Opie1Canopie]

So if both are inaccurate, how do you all estimate costs/traffic for your clients? I use both Overture and Google's systems to understand what it may cost given CTR parameters etc. Although I know it's rather inaccurate, it at least provides some information.

How do you all estimate?

[shorebreak]

Opie, we build our own model based on historical data and knowledge of the nature of Google's traffic estimator inaccuracies.

Sticky me if you'd like to talk further.

-Shorebreak

[Robsp]

We use the traffic estimator as one parameter and use experience with similar clients as the most important way to estimate.

Clicks and traffic are not that important BTW most clients want to know what their ROI will be which is even harder to to predict (so sell them a pilot).