I realize these guys are making a heroic effort of trying to extrapolate the number of searches across the whole big Internet but how accurate do you think they are to even pay attention to the number of searches they report? I am trying to search for more keywords around those that I already receive traffic from and it appears that my little site alone receives more searches on many of the keywords that I track than what Wordtracker reports for the entire Internet. Well, their network of search partners, anyways. Which of their data parameters do you think can be trusted and which are you using personally, please share.
Well, good for you! Care to elaborate? I hope you won't be offended by my follow-up question: I've known Wordtracker for years, used them and heard them spoken of by many big shots in the industry. I never heard of Market Samurai until today. If accuracy of Wordtracker appears to be questionable, how accurate (Laser-Target as they boast on their website) do you think some Market Samurai's results are then? And who calls their product Anything Samurai, anyways? What are they implying, that they are from Japan or if they fail they will perform harakiri? That just cracks me up!
Hi there 1-script, my name's Mal, and I work for Wordtracker Customer Support. I'd like to address a couple of points here, just to clarify your experience. It's not necessarily unusual for someone's analytics to show more keyword search volume than is shown in any keyword research tool. This is a data source issue - no tool has access to all searches worldwide, and Wordtracker's main keyword tool shows just under 1% of US searches for the past 365 days. There's no extrapolation to the numbers shown, they're raw numbers. The older toolset did provide an estimate of searches for the next 24 hours, but because it was an estimate rather than a clear figure, it's not been included in the new tool. Our data sources are metacrawler.com and dogpile.com, and because of our ten stage filtering process, it's largely clear of bot searches and spam. In some niches, the search counts can be perceived as being quite low, but we always advise users to treat the numbers as relative figures rather than absolutes, especially inside a niche, as this gives a clearer overview of the whole picture. I hope this is helpful, but please do let us know if you have any other questions - my direct mail is mal[at]wordtracker[dot]com. All the best, Mal
Thank you for your input, Mal. Always great to have an official source. I do understand limitations of the small dataset. Still, I am trying to see for myself if the information I'm gathering is worth the $$/month that you charge. From what I've seen so far it actually seems to be all over the place and I cannot make decisions based on it, which is a shame. I would be very interested to learn if you are planning on any expansion of the search partner's network. Two-nodes network is not much of a network, you need more sources. What are you guys doing to that end? Also, I am old enough to remember what Metacrawler and Dogpile are but I guarantee you vast majority of Internet users have no idea. Have you tried to partner up with some bigger ad networks to gather data from the back end by parsing the search engine referral URL? I don't really see meta search engines as a reliable source of search data going forward. Don't take me as a disgruntled customer which I'm not. I am not planning on canceling my account any time soon and in fact would pay more if I knew I could put more trust into the analytics I'm getting. Cheers!
Hi there, thanks for your reply. As data sources are often hard to come by, one of the things that Wordtracker is doing at the moment is to provide the best metrics possible on the data we have. Have you looked at the new competition metrics (In Anchor and Title) that we introduced a few weeks ago? In terms of data, I can't say too much at the moment, but we're working on a couple of cool things at the moment, suffice to say that the tool will be even more useful in the next few weeks. All the best, Mal