Is wordtracker accurate?

[joker]

I did a ton of research on wordtracker and one of the keywords my co used in the past shows 0 searches in 90 days. Management says that wordtracker cannot be accurate because they have done google searches using that keyword. How can I explain this to them when I'm a little puzzled myself? I'm a big advocate of wordtracker but is it odd that a lot of our keywords are not even showing up in wordtracker's database? Please advise. No one likes bad news and I've been delivering bad news-I just want to be able to back up the research. Thanks.

[wige]

I think the data can be skewed, because it only comes from two sources - dogpile.com and metacrawler.com. This can cause some keywords not to show up if they are not used by the demographic that uses these engines.

[erikko]

just like overture, wordtracker only gives you the possible return searches of a keyword. the best thing for you to make the results accurate is manually search your keyword

[mjtaylor]

Originally Posted by erikko

the best thing for you to make the results accurate is manually search your keyword

How does one manually search a keyword in order to find out what other users are doing?


Personally, I like using keyworddiscovery.com's tool in addition ... and Google's adwords suggestions when available. Several sources are better than one ... *and* I follow that up by checking to see what my visitors are using through log files.

MJ

[opel]

Originally Posted by wige

it only comes from two sources - dogpile.com and metacrawler.com.

Is this true? I have been using wordtracker for a while, however as G has so much of a strangle hold over the other SEs then thats the one I'm most interested in so I will need to bear that in mind.

mjtaylor makes a valid point that check more than one source and then make your own deductions.

[wige]

Originally Posted by wige

because it only comes from two sources - dogpile.com and metacrawler.com.

I got this from About Wordtracker

[erikko]

Originally Posted by mjtaylor

How does one manually search a keyword in order to find out what other users are doing?

MJ

personally i think of possible keywords that is:

1. related to the site/blog
2. what might the users might type into their search engines
3. i also try to do some stats regarding what will the users bear in mind when they will hear my site's subject for instance insurance or baby clothes

after acquiring these steps, i will collate the results and manually type every keyword that i think of in SE then i will take note of the number of competition every keyword

[mjtaylor]

Originally Posted by erikko

personally i think of possible keywords that is:

1. related to the site/blog
2. what might the users might type into their search engines
3. i also try to do some stats regarding what will the users bear in mind when they will hear my site's subject for instance insurance or baby clothes

after acquiring these steps, i will collate the results and manually type every keyword that i think of in SE then i will take note of the number of competition every keyword

Ah, yes, those are excellent ways to research possible keywords and their competitiveness. I thought you were talking about obtaining the frequency of searches done on keywords - the sort of data that Wordtracker provides.

Cheers, MJ

[Webnauts]

Doesn't anyone here use Overture?

[ctabuk]

Overture search tool is down - waiting for Yahoo to do something.

This thread was reported as being in the wrong place - correct - but it's established so I'll leave it here.

[alatxtc]

This is more of a statistics problem.

Wordtracker is utilizing something like 2% or less of all searches conducted on the Web to come up with their results. Is it accurate? Somewhat, but it is more a guide than a precise measuring tool. To be truly accurate using only 2% of the total searches, wordtracker would need to be able to conduct a truly random sampling of all searches, which is basically impossible for anyone to do. Google and Overture's projections should be the most accurate as they are pulling from the largest number of searches being conducted on the internet. Yet, I find their projection numbers to not be truly accurate either. I think that maybe they fudge their numbers a bit to protect their proprietary information. To go further, the number of times you and your clients conducted Google searches on the keyword or keywords would be the size of a pimple on a gnats behind in comparison to all of the searches done. It would be so small it would be completely insignificant and inconsequential. If there were a large number of searches conducted for the keyword term, some of them would have shown up in wordtracker.

What where the projections from Google and Overture for the keyword terms? I would look at the projections of Google, Overture and wordtracker in analyzing the potential from keywords, and I'll bet that Google and OVerture's predicted number of searches for the keyword terms you're speaking of are extremely low if any at all.

Also, bad news or not, isn't it better that your clients look at all of this now rather than later after they've spent a ton of money going after useless keyword terms?

[mjtaylor]

If you use the PPC programs of either Overture (Yahoo) or Google, you do have access to their prediction tools, and while they don't give actual numbers, they do provide relative strengths of keyword variations. And if you bid on the terms, obviously you can see exactly how many impressions each term gets in a given period.

Cheers, MJ

[MeanSEO]

I am getting so tired of the inaccurate results from wordtracker I may not renew my subscription coming up.

At this point I and dumped more than $700 in subscription fees on this lame s-l-o-w software so someone please show us what is better – and be prepared to prove it!

[JohneeMac]

Keyword Discovery - Advanced keyword research tool and search term suggestion tool seems to be WordTracker's competitor.

Find it quite useful myself, although its $70 a month.

[vinay11111]

Originally Posted by mjtaylor

How does one manually search a keyword in order to find out what other users are doing?


Personally, I like using keyworddiscovery.com's tool in addition ... and Google's adwords suggestions when available. Several sources are better than one ... *and* I follow that up by checking to see what my visitors are using through log files.

MJ

I agree woth you. I use both wordtrakcer and overture for keywords research.

[inertia]

Originally Posted by vinay11111

I agree with you. I use both wordtracker and overture for keywords research.

The UK version of Overture is stuck in May 2007 and i believe the US one is stuck in January 2007! I've moved over to Wordtracker as its the only tool which gives me UK only results and as most of my clients are UK only this is essential. Does anyone know of any other tool which displays UK only results?!

You Americans are lucky! The UK results on Wordtracker are really sub-standard and half the time keywords that i query come back with no counts at all even though i am positive they are getting some decent requests. I sent an email to Wordtracker asking them why their results were so much lower than Overture for certain keywords and this is the reply i got:

From Wordtracker:

The numbers at Overture have been extremely over-inflated by the number of different partners that they have.

Our conclusion is not only is the suggestion tool skewed by ranking software checking the positions within the engine, eg. WebPosition and hard coded queries in places such as epilot, but also all the bid optimizers have appeared recently. They consistently check rankings inside the pay-per-click engines, artificially inflating the values and skewing the results. There are over 15 bid checkers now. You can imagine what these are doing to the results.

We filter the data we use from our ISPs and Search Engines to make sure that it's not distorted in this way.

So that's why Overture's results can seam inflated.

Also, can anyone explain this? When i query the US results for "corporate entertainment" i get this :- 51 (searches) 89 (predicted)
When i query the UK results i get:- 1,999 (searches) but no predicted!
Is "corporate entertainment" not a phrase that is widely used in the states or has something gone seriously wrong with Wordtrackers data coz I'm sure the results for the US should be many times larger than the UK??

[vinay11111]

Same is the case with overture it is showing me results for the month of january 2007

[ctabuk]

I have moved this over here where the debate may increase

[inertia]

This is a really important subject for me at the moment! How do all you UK SEOs do your keyword research? Any input on UK only keyword research would be greatly appreciated.