Inconsistencies between Google Keyword Tool & Wordtracker

Hi Todd,

it can be frustrating trying to build not only a solid page rank but also get traffic from the keywords you choose. I did do a quick search on the Wordtracker free tool on 'diabetes 2 cure', and came up with the following results:

freekeywords[dot]wordtracker.com/?seed=diabetes+2+cure&adult_filter=remove_offensiv e&suggest=Hit+Me]Free Keyword Suggestion Tool From Wordtracker

There are some other keywords being used that you may want to consider including in your campaign.

In answer to your question about inconsistencies between the two tools, this is something that you're likely to find between any two keyword research tools. It's largely down to data sources.

While Google reports impressive search volumes, there are a number of
caveats:
• The figures Google provides are not actual searches but approximations. Like WT, Google takes a small sample and extrapolates an estimate from that. It's not clear what size the sample Google takes is, nor what the extrapolation applied to their sample to produce their results is.
• The default search position is 'broad match'. This highly inflates the search estimates for a particular keyword.

Here is Google's definition:

Broad Match - This is the default option. If you include general keyword or keyword phrases (such as tennis shoes) in your keyword list, your ads may appear when users search for tennis and shoes, in any order, and possibly along with other terms. For example, your ad may appear for the queries buy tennis shoes and tennis sneakers but not tennis players. Your ads may also be displayed on relevant variations of your keyword phrases and plurals, as well as some related keywords and phrases via our expanded keyword matching technology.

Broad matches are often less targeted than exact or phrase matches.

• The estimates returned by Google also contain searches from Google's content network. That's the wide range of sites that publish Google ads.
• Google are also reporting monthly estimates while Wordtracker provides daily estimates.
This means that on first examination the Google counts will seem much higher than WT.

Wordtracker has always been completely open about where we get our data from. We take our information from two metacrawlers, Dogpile.com and Metacrawler.com. People use such search engines to search Google, MSN and Yahoo at the same time and as such provides very clean bot-free data. We get daily records which represents approximately just under 1% of daily searches across all search engines.

We have had our sampling and extrapolation methods verified by an independent mathematical consultancy, ThinkTank and are confident they provide valuable information to our many thousands of customers.

I do hope this is of some help, but if you have any other questions, please don't hesitate to contact me at mal[at]wordtracker.com

Google keyword tool is not particularly accurate as a means to estimate SE traffic as it takes it's results from several places and not just it's main search engine page. The results are from the Google Search Network and not only from Google.com

I have seen keywords I am #1 for show up as gaining 1500+ searches per month by the Google keyword tool (in exact search not broad) but in reality I am getting no more than a few dozen visits per month.

I've used wordtracker and it seems to be far more accurate so I would stick with that if I was you :-)

On the right hand site of the results under "Match Type" there is a drop down that says BROAD, change it to EXACT

Great thread warriors! It filled in some of the cracks for me!