I was just checking out Wordtracker in earnest today, and saw a huge discrepancy in results from the two above.. Here's the WT report: The corresponding searches on Overture for August is: If I'm reading this right (cause I'm new to WT), 150 searches/day searched for: cheap flights new york new york While on Overture, only 389 people searched that phrase last month. Why would you guess that the numbers are so skewed. Also, I checked out another that was absolutely opposite... had 100K+ overture searches, but very few to none on WT. Any thoughts? Do you have any experience in this area? Thanks, Starke
I have a a paid subscription to WordTracker, and I asked them that very same question. Here is their response: Posted on 05 Sep 2006 03:54 PM Hello The numbers at Overture have been extremely over-inflated by the number of different partners that they have. We have many keyword positions where the figures just don't match up at all. "Keywords" is a great example. If we were to look at Overture's stats, we should be receiving 600-1200 a day. We receive about 70-120 per day. Our conclusion is not only is the suggestion tool skewed by ranking software checking the positions within the engine, eg. WebPosition and hardcoded 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. This is why we will always use metacrawlers as the results will never be distorted in this way. Here are some other issues: Overture compresses the plural and singular version together. If you do this with our database you get: virus - 3701 viruses - 1373 Total - 5074 Overture's data is for a period of 30 days, whereas ours is only for the one day. So, to get a comparable number: 5074 x 30 Total - 152,220 Overture includes many of its channels such as Yahoo and Altavista as well as a few small engines and so represents much more than 10% of total searches. I have also included an article that details the differences between Overture and Wordtracker: http://www.wordtracker.com/articles/index.php/academy/demystifying_the_radically_different_keyword_results_provided_by_overture_a/ Kind regards, Anne Curtis Customer Support Manager
Thanks Brandon... I know what you mean, and I read the article in the past (it's good)... but the article left me with even more questions. This is the total searches last month on Overture for the term "keyword": 58133 keyword According to the article, there would have actually been around 580 searches with about the 1/10 visitors = 58/month or about 1.9/day. Another thing with overture and WT. Some overture terms are searched at only triple & double digits /mo. For instance: 536 keyword suggestion 529 bid keyword 511 keyword submission 509 keyword search top 505 analyzer density keyword 497 keyword meta tag 497 keyword style 478 insert keyword 463 billing keyword 459 elite keyword Now I can see some strange ones being much less, but I can also see 500 searchs a month for the above words too. I understand that there may be some skewed results from Overture, but, don't necessarily agree with the WT article.