Overture keyword research tool accuracy?

Overture showing some type of broad matching of keyword terms in results?

[financialhost]

I have recently been doing keyword research and i have something of a problem with the research results.

For example - typing widgets in the overture suggestion tool for US users, shows Fuzzy Red Widgets - 910 searches a day. While the term Red Widgets - only shows 613 searches a day.

Now the problem is we have both these terms in our google adword campaign but the impressions are completely out compared to the above results.

Red Widgets - 618 impressions per day.
Fuzzy Red Widgets - 34 impressions per day.

Both of these terms appear on the first page of all searches.

So how can overture say that Fuzzy Red Widgets gets 910 impressions per day while on google it only gets 34?

I can't believe that overtures network which is mostly yahoo's users , would have such different results.

Am i missing something? Perhaps they use some sort of broad matching on overture or google - so that every combination of Fuzzy Red Widgets or Red Widgets is counted for the final impressions?

Any suggestions really appreciated as this is a mystery to me.

[edited by: mona at 10:50 pm (utc) on May 11, 2005]

[deejay]

Overture does use a 'broad match' in its figures - your 'fuzzy red widgets' result actually includes

fuzzy red widgets
red fuzzy widgets
red widgets fuzzy
fuzzy widgets red
etc...

[brizad]

Overture's numbers are always way off and very inaccurate. There in a post somewhere on WebmasterWorld that explains why overture's numbers are so far off.

From what I understand they do their calculations based on all sorts of "traffic" that is not really valid traffic. Things like, spiders, people like you searching for the numbers for a particular KW, etc. I don't remember all of them but it does expalin why their numbers are so far off.

From my experience count on about 1/4th to 1/10th of the traffic that overture shows. Wordtracker is far more accurate and worth every penny.

[HostingDirectory]

Does anyone know where that link to the thread explaining why overtures data is so unreliable?

I did a search but could not find it.

[Robert Charlton]

Does anyone know where that link to the thread explaining why overtures data is so unreliable?

Here are some links about why everybody's data is unreliable....

Overture's Search Term Suggestion Tool
How reliable is it?
[webmasterworld.com...]

The best keyword tool?
[webmasterworld.com...]

Big change in Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool
now returning search strings in alphabetical order
[webmasterworld.com...]

More and more, I'm trusting the Google keywords suggestion tool to give me the best accurately ordered list, but without the numbers. No one's numbers are accurate.