AdWords Keyword Tool Confursion

Hi all.
I'm using the KeywordTool application but I see some things that are 'too good to be true'.
For example, i put a keyword and it says that it was searched on Sept 165,000 times. (to me thats a lot...) and whats really weird is that the "competiton" bar at the left is completly white, meaning it has Very Low comptetition.
So for a keyword that is searched so much and has low competition, could I make a killing by bying that keyword in Adwords?
Is this tool accurate?

 

165k impressions is normal for a semi popular keyword. If there is no competition it could mean that google does not allow advertising for that keyword

If you can buy it then If you were able to capture 1% of the traffic that would be 1650 clicks a month.

If you paid .25 on avg that would be a cost of $412.50 a month in google expenses

If you could convert 1% of the traffic that would be 16.5 sales and you would need an offer that paid $25 per conversion to break even

If you could convert 10% of the traffic that would be 165 sales and you would need an offer that paid $2.5 to break even

 

OP,

I too had a similar experience yesterday. I must admit I do not use the keyword tool that often but I did so yesterday actually to check search traffic for one of my terms "silver jewellery" and associated terms as suggested by the tool. I discovered two things

1. The number of suggested terms seems to have increased dramatically from what I remember previously and that is good to see.
2. There were several terms that had comparatively high search numbers with apparently zero competition.

And, Robert, they are not disallowed by Google because I have been getting impressions for them for 18 months since starting this game. I would suggest they are fairly routine keywords for any one in the silver jewllery business; I certainly would not describe them as "long tail". A number of them are also extremely competitive with 1st page estimates way above what I can afford to bid (even with qs8 or 10).

Just checked and the situation is still the same if not worse, i.e. even more showing zero competition.

Not sure what this all means though, except there may be some bug in the tool?

So, OP, I am afraid it is highly unlikely you will be making a killing. I suggest you try bidding on the word and see what feedback you get in terms of postion and 1st page estimate - that should give you a better idea of the competition.

 

Keyword tool is not very accurate and often gives misleading information. I would treat its output with caution. The best way to get accurate information is to bid on the keywords and use that data. The problem with this is you could add keywords that get little traffic and aren't worth adding and you will only find out AFTER you have added them. Maybe the next best thing would be to do a search and judge by how many competitors there are if you go ahead or not.

 

If I were to use the keyword "reduce my debt" the tool shows that there isn't much competition out there, but then if you actually go ahead and do a Google search for that you'll realise that this simply isn't true. Think about it, the tool only gives you data for the kw you entered, but there will be hundreds of people out there bidding on "debt" alone on broad match which would also appear next to your ad.

The tool is good to give a very rough idea, but don't put your house on the line expecting it to be accurate!!

 

I do not think it works quite like that. Taking your term "reduce my debt" I get the following sponsored results for broadmatch searches

• "reduce my debt" 56 results
• "reduce debt" 181 results
• "my debt" 163 results
• "debt" 741 results
• "reduce" 15062 results

No, I am with Trishan on this; I think the tool is a bit flaky at the moment.

 

Thanks to all for the posts. I have a better understanding of this now.
If this tool doesnt give accurate results, it would be good not to rely only on it, maybe a good thing is to compare the results with another tool.