How to estimate real visitor volume potential

Hi y'all,

its a long shot, but if anyone knows, surely its the black hat viewers.

Its a fundamental question, but one that Google seems to give imprecise info on.

Basically I am looking at the real world meaning of the differences in volumes for broad, phrase and exact matches using google's external keyword tool. Yes I know there are plenty of paid tools on the market, and ones that seem to give more regular updates, but please humour me ...

I get the technical meaning of the differences, but here is a real world example.

the example is for gluten variations in the US, all languages.

gluten free food: broad = 27,100, phrase = 12,100, exact = 2,900
gluten free: broad = 1.22 mil, phrase = 1.22 mil, exact = 27,100
gluten: broad = 1.5 mil, phrase = 1.5 mil, exact = 49,500

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now exact means the search words in the same order ONLY in the search box

and phrase means that this phrase in this order is used somewhere in the search string.

broad means that any of the words in the string can be in any order anywhere in the search string.

So my question is how to use these keyword tool volume lists to understand the total unique searchers for a whole word associated list of terms such as (gluten free) AND how many visitors (or at lease searches) the different match types really mean.

adding the volumes for the top 800 BROAD search terms together (for Gluten Free) gets about 9 million searches.

Gluten free [exact] associated words list gets about 750 terms and a total volume of about 600,000 searches per month.

is the reason that the broad total volume is so large is that it double and triple counts one search term? for instance, in broad terms (gluten) = 1.5 mil visits and gluten free = 1.2 mil that makes sense if gluten is counted for any search for GLUTEN and GLUTEN FREE

HOWEVER, since almost every gluten free associated term in the broad list has the word GLUTEN in it, why isnt this term about 8 million searches (out of the total list sum of 9 million).

I get the feeling that the exact volumes are more likely to represent the exact number of total searches for a market such as gluten free, however feel that the PHRASE match may be of value in calculating totals.

any advice on how to count real searches for a market such as above?

You understand the terms of exact,broad,phrase and they are correct. But there is one thing you are missing. G00gle only displays search results as a "estimate" for everything all the values are rounded up for exact,broad and phrase. You also have to realize there is going to be people who will use the word multiple times during a search phrase so that 9 million count could only represent 4.5 million people performing at least two searches that include the word gluten in their searches.

You also have to take into consideration that market size is not dependent on one search engine. People will jump to yahoo if they can not find what they are looking for on g00gle. Then there will be others will with just stick with using bing/ask/altavista.

To answer your question. No, there is no way can get "real searche values" because adwords/yahoo ads/bing advertising does not pull all search data based on unique ip addresses. Everything they display is only a estimate. And worse yet, they all round up.

"how to count real searches for a market" discover the converting keywords first, then slash the displayed search numbers in half, then estimate the traffic number in the position you plan on buying/ranking on.

A good answer ...

However this is the next layer of analysis that I have been doing. Looking at many countries broad search volumes I have read repeatedly that maybe only half of the volume is on Google search, the other half are volumes for their search network partners. The of course do this because the tool is for adwords, not to provide clean volume estimates.

But if people are searching for a term like gluten free on another network (not search engine) then I am happy to include it.

Then to normalise all results I adjust data for internet penetration and Google market share in the country. yes these are all estimates, but by multiplying the market volumes by the inverse of these percentages at least I normlise data across all countries.

Logically it would appear that EXACT matches are the closest thing to the exact number of searchers (not unique visitors etc of course), but I still wonder about the accuracy of the data (acknowledging the rounding G does).

For instance, the country "Turkey" BROAD search terms for GLUTEN FREE are 35 and have a volume of about 16,000. Yet EXACT search comes up with ONLY FOUR terms for about 1,000 searches. The lowest search volume word for the EXACT database is (gluten free) for 46 searches. That is the exact list has no long tail keywords. Sure you might say that these tails aren't consistent enough to rate in the exact search world, yet long tails like (gluten free diets), (gluten free products), (wheat free) regularly each month have around 50 plus BROAD search volumes. Surely these mid size tails should be logged in the EXACT database as well as they are an extension of gluten free?

Do you think this means that the Exact database underestimates EXACT searches, and is there any way you can think of by how much it under estimates?

I am now looking at re analysing all the previous global gluten free market analysis I have done based on EXACT search volume data, but the terms look so small in number and the volumes are very blocky, and don't include long tail.

What do you think? Thanks in advance ...

I have noticed that depending on the type of search term g00gle might not lump the long tail search data into the exact match at all because g00gle doesn't believe they are related even if the word gluten is included in the search. Searching for gluten in adwords returns "whole foods" as a related search term, does it merge the totals into the single word of gluten? or how about the common misspelling of gluton? It seems regardless of correct spelling or not they are lumping data together, how or what data is being lumped together, the only people who can tell you that is the ones who worked on the adwords keyword tool, the g00gle keyword tool is far from perfect.

"Do you think this means that the Exact database underestimates EXACT searches, and is there any way you can think of by how much it under estimates?"

They definitely "over estimate" exact searches because they figure out the average based on search history of the keyword. The search history of a keyword could have had a spike in searches, be it from people doing market research or a sudden news channel advertisements.

If a term gets exact searches of one hit per day then at the end of the month there will be exactly 30 searches. But if feb 20 opera writes a book about gluten free diet, the search term gets a spike of 200 searches for a single day. Then the total number of 30 hits plus 200 hits, are added, then divided by the 30 days, which gives you the average searches per month of 7.6 per day. 30 * 7 = 210.

The following month we target search terms by building back links to get rankings. The next month we get the number 1 rankings for the search term but we are only receiving 1 hit per day, but why is that when g00gle adwords states 210 per month, we think, we should be getting 7 hits per day cause adwords said so! But the reason is the search traffic has stabilized at its normal rate.

Are these spikes calculated for all keywords? You bet! Are all the spikes related to the term calculated into the results Yup. Which keywords they are merging together? Well we cant be sure of that because we don't have access to that information. Only the developers of the keywordtool know that answer.

Any exact search terms i get from g keywordtool, i always cut the value in half. I never target in adwords or rankings for any keyword under 30,000 searches. Everything below this number is highly inaccurate search information.

Now what you are suggesting in your post is your trying to get a "global estimate" of the total market share for one a general product type by using data from several sources. Each source you gather information from, would have to be scrutinized for accuracy. Any source that is faulty will give you faulty results if your trust their assumptions. If you lump together everyone's data then there will be even more flaws in your presentation. Of course no one can get the exact numbers for any market share, there all going to be estimates. Even Forbes magazine estimates market share only based on the top 10 performing companies in their industry and do not take into consideration of all the little guys they do business with to bring them in the big profits.

I've been stung too many times by the inaccuracy of google's adwords tool. There is nothing more frustrating that working hard to rank for a keyword that turns out to be a dud...much less search volume than you anticipated. Not only is it a waste of money, its a waste of time because of how long it takes to rank some of these keywords.

I've been told, and am about to start implementing it that in order to get any accurate representation of the search volume, you gotta run an adwords campaign and count the impressions. This is the only way to really know what the search volume is for a targe keyword.

reptile said:

I've been stung too many times by the inaccuracy of google's adwords tool. There is nothing more frustrating that working hard to rank for a keyword that turns out to be a dud...much less search volume than you anticipated. Not only is it a waste of money, its a waste of time because of how long it takes to rank some of these keywords.

I've been told, and am about to start implementing it that in order to get any accurate representation of the search volume, you gotta run an adwords campaign and count the impressions. This is the only way to really know what the search volume is for a targe keyword.

Click to expand...

That is a nice tip that you mentioned, running an adwords campaign to count impressions. That definitely makes sense. This way will give you some very accurate ideas for sure. Now I must try it out, especially since I got $100 free adwords coupon