Reposting in the appropriate forum.. ------------ Hi, I've seen the threads about this topic and also seen comparisons. But I still don't get why I should pay to use one of the commercial tools if all I want to do is to run an AdWords campaign. Here are the things I've tried:- 1. Wordtracker - Used their 7-day trial account to enter my root or core keywords and got some suggested keywords back. I then used the Competition search and got a report ranked by Impressions & KEI . Problem is they're saying there were 45 searches (really small) with Broad match. I ran a starter campaign for 2 days before and got many, many impressions (something like 1000). Admittedly, I had a high Max CPC. But Wordtracker does not correlate to CPC. Also, 1000 actual impressions on AdWords vs. 45 searches in Wordtracker. Can someone help me reconcile the two vastly different numbers? Also, WT divides no. of searches by the number of pages returned by the search engine. I want to find keywords that are commercially convertable. I don't want educational keywords. I also want to know what the competition level is for the commercially convertable keywords. I can't find a way to get WT to give that to me. Then I might as well continue to use the free Google keywords tool. Please tell me why I should use WT. 2. Keyword Discovery - Same thing. How do I know which keywords are likely to lead to a sale? - Also the the graphs seemed to indicate a flurry of activity around Valentine's Day for the term "vegetarian protein". It goes up from 400 searches to about 3800 searches. Is that a demo graph or an actual graph for vegetarian protein? Is it 400 searches per month or what ? what unit? Again, the numbers are way below Google's. Google's are like 24,000 and KD is 500. What gives? Jug
I don't use any of those. Google's estimates always seem inflated to me. You might want to look at wordze.com. They don't use googles DB and are much better, in my opinion. Zeek
Use Keyword spy... It's worth the money and you will get keywords your competitors are already using...
If you have a low budget, just use the Google AdWords keyword tool. The area where paid keyword research software is better is that they help you uncover lesser known long tail keywords that can be very profitable. Keyword Spy as mentioned is great if you want to analyze what your competitors use. By taking a good look at their campaigns you should be able to tell which ones are bidding smarter. Keyword Discovery has different data than wordtracker and Google because they all have different data centers. The Google AdWords keyword tool data is known as being inflated as they include stats from their entire search network. They also round numbers off strangely which makes the data tough to trust.
I've found that Google is pretty unreliable for actual searches and I almost never get the results I would expect with their inflated results. To get currently trending results I go to Google Insights for search to see what people are searching for within the last 30 days to 2 years. You don't get numbers of searches, but you do get the top 10 results for each seed keyword. You can then click each seed keyword to get 10 more results based on the one you clicked on, and on and on. Check it out here: http://www.google.com/insights/search/