I've been playing with the Google AdWords Keyword Tool [adwords.google.com]. I generate a list of keywords, then change the data display dropdown to "Search Volume Trends", and finally I export the data as a spreadsheet so I can calculate some averages and do some sorting.
What I've found is that the month labels appear to be completely wrong. The way I found this out was by a generic term, [mothers day gifts]. According to the spreadsheet I exported, [mothers day gifts] last had its peak demand month in...August. August? There it was, along with a bunch of other mothers-day-oriented keywords: Aug...Aug...Aug...Aug. Even mousing over the jutting bar graph for that keyword on the Keyword Tool page yielded an "Aug" tooltip.
However, when I looked at the "Highest Volume Occurred In" field on the page, it clearly indicated "May", not "Aug". I returned to the spreadsheet and shifted all the month labels so that "May" replaced "August", and the trend data immediately made sense.
OK, so I feel a little bit better about the quality of the data now, but my question is this: Is this "bad search volume trend month label" issue something people have known about for a while, or is it a recent development?
