What was interesting was the bar chart that showed traffic in Jan and Feb falling to 10% of traffic in Nov and Dec.
Of course I started looking at other terms and see this profile appearing fairly widespread across seasonal terms, business to business terms, consumer items and several other segments I track.
Given the economy (thanks to Warren Buffett for the use of the phrase) I am thinking to myself "no wonder" here.
Oddly enough, even words like bankruptcy have fallen off the very same cliff.
Is this a reflection of reality or has something gone awry at the Googleplex?
My final question is this: are you seeing similar actual "drop off a cliff" type figures for your AdWords advertising - and the likely related behavior of advertisers pushing up their bids and or getting out entirely, or are things pretty normal for WebmasterWorld AdWords folks?
Is this a glitch, have people stopped Googling all of the sudden in 2009, or has Google changed the parameters for Search Volume starting from 2009?
<pardon the bounce!>
Definitely not right.
Pretty much no matter what the keyword is, Adwords Keyword Tool is reporting its Search Volume being a lot smaller in January and February 2009, as compared to 2008 months.
Keywords______Approx Search Volume: February_____Approx Avg Search Volume
internet______1,500,000__________________________45,500,000
baby__________3,350,000__________________________101,000,000
beer__________450,000____________________________16,600,000
marketing_____Not enough data____________________20,400,000
panda_________673,000____________________________6,120,000
(p*** word)___55,600,000_________________________226,000,000
webmaster_____60,500_____________________________450,000
Is Google not reporting correctly?
It's obviously not reporting correctly, the question is why.
My suspicion is that the numbers represent a partial reporting but from which source? Do the numbers reflect searches made on the G homepage only? From publisher sites using the search tool only?
I'd like to know which source provided those figures or to find out if the average figures have been wrong. Only Google knows.
My analytics is doing the same thing. When I check traffic figures in analytics and match them down to specific content pages I see some heavily trafficked pages (that show me which keyword led to the traffic) but when I look up keywords in analytics that term, and many others, don't show up at all.
In short analytics is providing some extremely contradicting data too.
[edited by: JS_Harris at 10:01 am (utc) on Mar. 16, 2009]
But now November 2008 Search Volume Trends is similarly extremely low across the board. Previously all of 2008 trends looked fine. Maybe Google is in process of applying fixes.
Just double checked this now and the "cliff" seems to be gone.
Internet - 30.5 mil searches - Feb
baby - 80 mil searches - Feb
These and others seem closer to normal - and yes, November still seems out of whack.
Did anybody see this dip and fix reported elsewhere?
