Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool

How accurate are these numbers?

[brass monkey]

Has anyone noticed that the number of searches for a given month for a given term seem inflated?

For most terms, our click through percentage would indicate the numbers are fairly accurate, but for others they're way off (especially for the services terms).

[jeremy goodrich]

The numbers of any widely used tool will always be questionable - because if the search volume for a competitive keyword is in fact reported to be higher than it actually is -

that might mean an advertiser would be more comfortable paying too much for the keyword, thinking that the target market for the product and / or reach of the Overture service is greater than it actually is. :)

I've read here before that for competitive keyword(s), take the number and divide it by 2 - at least to guestimate. Hope this helps.

[JamesR]

I really think they are estimates. Comparing those numbers to high ranking sites at Yahoo and Google just don't pull the volume. Also, it doesn't seem to reflect the variety of keywords that searchers use at Google. However, it is a good starting place and estimate to get going. Once a site is up, examine log files closely to see about additional keyword possibilities.

[brass monkey]

Another thought on this issue:

Could these numbers be inflated when people use software such as Web Position Gold?

When running the reports, the software goes out to each site to see where a certain web site comes up under a specific keyword or phrase.

Do the engines and directories view this as an acutal hit to that keyword/phrase (thus possibly inflating the numbers from the software programs people use for ranking reports)?

[Conard]

brass_monkey,
You hit it right on the nose, plus there are several auto bidding tools that can now check for current bids and adjust bid amounts 24 times a day.
That amounts to way more searches then just John Does searching on anysearchengine.com.

[jatar_k]

Also consider that the more people there are bidding on the word the more likely there are to be people searching for that word with out clicking on anything.

Just a client searching to see what position his marketing company have him in or to see how much competitors are paying.

[brass monkey]

So basically, there is no rule of thumb to gage the accuracy of the search results from the Search Term Suggestion Tool on Overture...

This can be pretty misleading when people are trying to position their web sites (other than just isolating the categories whose biddings are very competitive)...

Thanks for the thoughts and feedback...

[Jane_Doe]

I suspect that both Wordtracker and Overture numbers are inflated due to people checking their keywords, though less so for Wordtracker because it doesn't have as strong of ties to a PPC program.

For example, one of the keywords I go after also has a lot of dentists' sites focused on the same keyword. One dentist has the keyword and his city in his URL. It's a city most people have never heard of that I'll call smallTown.

When you check the Wordtracker and Overtures stats, there's always a lot of searches for "keyword smallTown". In fact there are many more searches for "keyword smallTown" than there are for "keyword New York" or "keyword Chicago" or "keyword Phoenix".

It's obvious the numbers just show this dentist checking his position a lot. Either that or his small town has some kind of dental plague going on, which seems less likely. So if this one guy can influence Wordtracker and Overture results significantly, imagine what impact thousands of web site owners, if not tens or hundreds of thousands more, can do to search statistics where it may not be as obvious to tell that that numbers are inflated by position checking.

So I do check the results for keywords in both Overture and Wordtracker, but I also take them with a grain of salt, especially for highly competitive terms. I think for highly competitive terms that the number of requests for those terms becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy based on the number of people going after those terms and then checking on their own web site positions. Plus I think it's important to factor in that there's always people who are going to devote some time each day to searching for their keywords and then clicking on their competitors PPC ads to try to drain their advertising budget. This means that the actual number of potential customers searching for competive terms may be much smaller than the actual number of reported searches.

[brass monkey]

Thanks Jane Doe...

I agree with your thoughts and have felt that way since being in this business as a web promotion consultant...