Just wanted to share with you guys some interesting data we came across today when we accidentally broke the GOOGLE adwords tool; http://www.brisbanemultimediadesign.com/index.html While searching for good keywords to SEM, we manage to break the site and during the session we were able to grab some interesting data from the backend of the Google adwords tool. Some very interesting insight into how the tool works, and we've come to our own conclusion on what the dataset represented eg: exact number of searches per month of a given phrase. I know there has been some other reports of actual search result pages breaking and dumping some random codes. But this was the only case I found for the adwords keyword tool. We managed to keep the session running for about 10 minutes. And during that time we were able to collect some pretty cool results for high volume search phrases such as 'seo' 'online marketing' 'viagra' and others I've only posted a group of keywords on our site with the error dump, for those that are interested PM me for the full dataset for the other phrases. heres a sample of what we found; goto this news item on our site to check out the rest of the code (too much data to post here)
How this data is going to help any one? It just looks like some java script, so what we are suppose to do with it?
If you goto our website, there is a full data dump of the error. I just included a small snippet here. we did manage to work our what these values represented. (kinda) edit: site is here http://www.brisbanemultimediadesign.com/index.html
but some interesting things to ponder besides the results. what is "'sensei_keyword' , if you google it - nothing appears in the search results. Yet its used extensively on the adwords tool.
Would love to be able to replicate the error, but as soon as google realised something was wrong, they canned my session after 10 minutes of bliss I saved a copy of the page on MHT format and kept a copy of the cookie, but since the error codes appear in an iframe, its pretty much useless. :/
If you look closely, you will see that the Estimated CPC is actually the same as your "Searches" category (rounded, with decimals). Don't think you've tripped the wire this time, but keep at it.
SEOs sometimes use this tool to research keyword popularity. It's good because it gives us an idea of phrase popularity among users and advertisers as well. The problem is that it has always been a green bar, which could be 10, 10,000 or 10,000,000 users - that we didn't know. And now (thanks to this glitch) we do. Targeting the right phrase is 50% of your SEO work, because if you target the wrong phrase you could be wasting a lot of time and money.
You've broken nothing and you've discovered nothing new. What you've got is simply adwords javascript code that due to a stop in your internet connection didn't had enough time to load properly to execute, so it was displayed on your browser. Regarding the so called monthly searches figures, wrong again, they are simply adwords inbuilt cost system. As you can see 1 cent = 10000 cost points. Cheers