Got the same message after 24 hours later.
Do you get this message after having used it for awhile, or immediately upon trying to access it for the first time, or in some other scenario?
Have you tried clearing cache and re-booting?
I haven't heard of this as an issue, but I'll certainly keep my ears open.
AWA
Has anyone had a problem with "Traffic Estimator"?
Yeah, it doesn't work worth a cr*p! ;-)
Its never been even remotely accurate as far as I can tell. It might say you get 10,000 clicks but in reality you get 10. The positions it predicts are never even close. I can't tell you how many times it's told me that I would be in position 2 or 3 and then I end up at #30 or something.
I don't even use it anymore. I just put in my words and set my bid and then see what happens in the real world.
Just to prove the skewness of the estimates, I did a quick experiment with the help of the Overture's Bid Tool and the Google Estimator. I used Overture, as the bids are visible to everyone and I have found Google and Overture to be equally competitive in most of our keywords. Here is the result.
Keyword Google Estd Overture Actual Overture Price
Position for Position for for first
a bid of $ 0.1 a bid of $ 0.1 position
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------mortgage 7.6 173 $ 3.61
mesothelioma 7.0 33 $42.57
credit card 4.1 101 $ 4.72
life insurance 5.0 112 $ 8.72
auto insurance 7.5 134 $13.00
If this is the skewness with respect position, the skewness with respect to CTRs was also equally bad. Before when we were able to see the expected CTRs through the API , I had seen many cases in which the first position was expected to get a CTR of 6% while the 7th position would get a CTR of 4%. Come on give me a break, I have used Adwords enough to know that the fall off in CTR with respect to the position is much more precipitous.
My paranoid theory is that Google is overstimating the clicks on purpose. For after all how many users would be willing to put up an ad for a keyword if expected position is 100 and expected CTR is 0.1%. If Google is not doing it on purpose, it is guilty of wilful neglect of the estimator or of hubris in thinking that the Estimates are good despite so many users complaining about it. If Google is not able to provide reliable estimates atleast give access to the Impression count which is much more reliable. Overture probably realizes that estimation of clicks is a tricky business and hence only shows the actual impressions for the prior month.(This should in no way be construed as a recommendation for Overture as it has a whole bunch of other issues)
Further more till last month, we could access the Estimates for the Impressions through the API. Instead of providing that data through the the GUI also, they made things worse by removing that metric from the API.
FromRocky, are you referring to ordinary access to the Traffic Estimator from within an account?
AWA, I normally access to the Traffic Estimator in two ways after I signed in:
1. Tools --> Traffic Estimator
2. Within Campaign
The first one gave me some troubles but the second worked most of the time. However, I prefer the first one for many applications. It's also based on my entire account rather than the campaign results.
Do you get this message after having used it for awhile, or immediately upon trying to access it for the first time, or in some other scenario?
It got this message after having
1. used it for a while
2. used it for few minutes
3. just accessed and used it the first time
4. returned from the second way
Have you tried clearing cache and re-booting?
Tried re-booting and clearing cache but it did not work either.
It's unreliable. You don't know when it works.
As it stands now, they just get something that makes it almost impossible to suggest a budget or what they are likely to see, especially if it is a regionally targeted campaign.
It would be much easier to sell new AdWords clients and make more money for Google if it was possible to show them the number of searches or some fairly concrete metric to try to back into.
