Overture vs. Wordtracker vs. my own stats...?

Why such a massive difference, and how should I approach finding new words?

[Undead Hunter]

OK folks:

I'm a newbie to keyword research tools, and exceedly confused. I'm looking at a two word combination: "blue widget" (and its NOT a seasonal phrase)

- Wordtracker says there was 1,700 searches in 60 days (or 850 a month)

- Overture reports 100,000 searches (!) in one month, April 2004

- My own web logs report 1,100 searches in April 2004 (and we have some good rankings on the term)

So let me get this straight. I'm getting 1% of what Overture says is being searched for, but I'm getting more than 100% of what WordTracker says is out there...yes, every single search on the Wordtracker engines resulted in a click to my domain? Plus a few more?

That dog don't hunt.

Is Wordtracker so far off the map?
Or is Overture?
How can you use these tools if they are so far out there? I would think that a really LOW search term on the WordTracker engines might actually have enough traffic to go after, if that's the scale of discrepancy...?

...and while we're at it, can I not assume that since Google has more market share than Overture, if I see 100,000 on Overture that means at least an additional 100,000 more searches on Google? So, can you double what you see on Overture, assuming you have pages on Yahoo, etc. AND Google?

Any guidance is greatly appreciated.

Hunter

[martinibuster]

• Wordtracker data is an extrapolation. It's not exact. It's like an educated guess
• Overture data is generally overstated- fraudulent clicks are still included.

[bufferzone]

I never take Wordtracker or Overture estimates as a definite number, but use their estimates to judge the relationship between the different keywords. If keyword1 are estimated to get 100 hits and keyword2 10, in my world it means tha keyword1 will do 10 times better then keyword2.

When you have been in the game long enough, you will begin to know what your local conversion rate to **** and Overture is and then use the numbers to give you a true estimate over the actual traffic. Keep looking and noting the estimates and the actual numbers. This way you will quickly learn the true relationship.

[Undead Hunter]

Thanks folks:

I didn't realize this was covered in other columns, with slightly different wording. Hopefully this will help other people find these answers under different search phrases. (Ironically.)

Hunter