Google AdWords vs Google Keyword Tool part III
This is the conclusion to my short test to compare the Google Keyword Tool records against Adwords advert impressions to see if they match up.
I believe the results of the Google Keyword Tool to be wildly overoptimistic but I wanted to findout by how much. I setup an Ad for a keyword one of my sites is ranked number two for in Google.
For March 2010 the GKWT says there were 12,100 exact searches for my keyword.
My ad, when it was on page one in Google got around 200 impressions per day.
The ad only ran for two weeks but the impressions stayed around the 200 per day mark during this time.
200 per day x 31 days = 6,200 searches.
So it looks like the GKWT is reporting 100% more searches than the number of impressions the advert received.
Also during my site was only get about 3-6 unique hits per day (nearly all from organic SERPS) which is a click through rate of about 3% for being number two in Google which sucks big time!
It would be interesting to see if other people got the same results but at the end of the day its probably not worth the effort.
Was your ad running all day every day?
I suppose you also have to take on board that the GKWT is showing an average for a specific month, though that shouldn’t make a huge difference if it was only March.
Yeah all day, every day for the two weeks.
Thanks for this informative post. I’m really surprised that no2 only gets 3%, imagine what you might get at no1! Most of my sites are below no5 and I do ok but I must get them higher…
This could be an obvious thing but was your ad running/targeting the same country as the GKWT? The GKWT has a habit of defaulting to US…
Aye captain.
I’m astonished. That means the tools is way more accurate than I would have thought. I would have expected not even a tenth of the number of impressions that the tool reports.
Oh
*%&@! My expectations are based on the sort of traffic and SERPS positions of my sites which means I am probably doing something very, very wrong somewhere!!!I still hardly get any click throughs though so maybe we are both doing something wrong.
The other thing that could be affecting click throughs outside of the actual SERPs is the title of the page and the description of what is on the page. I’m sure you’re already doing this but a nice ‘call to action’ style description written specifically to get click throughs could help you?
When writing your title tags and descriptions use the same techniques you would to try and get a click through on a ppc ad. Perhaps looking at the results on the page will help you indentify something that jumps out.
You are in a visible position on the page it is just a case of attracting the searchers eye. Using the keyword will help it appear in bold and should increase ctr.