Thread: Adwords keyword tool vs Wordtracker

What difference do you find between Adwords keyword tool and Wordtracker?

What I have seen that both gives you different number of searches.

Also, Wordtracker gives mainly long tail keywords while Adwords gives short keywords.

Any more differences?

Hi Randhir,

My name's Mal and I work with Wordtracker (disclaimer done!)

This is a question that comes into our support network from time to time, so I'll copy in the reply that we send to customers asking. I hope you find it useful.

We think that the Google Adwords tool makes the Google service an excellent PPC tool

However, the number of results returned by Google is up to around 800 (often much lower while with Wordtracker, users get and can download up to 2000 keywords.

We feel that Google is using this tool to generate new Adwords accounts from where it makes its money. Wordtracker provides an independent keyword research service on a subscription basis – we do not make money from each keyword result that people might build on.

While Google reports impressive search volumes, there are a number of caveats: The figures Google provides are not necessarily actual search volumes but approximations. Like Wordtracker, Google takes a sample, but then extrapolates an estimate from that. From our research that sample appears small but we're still investigating. The default search position is broad match. This can highly inflate 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.

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.

Added to this, Wordtracker has excellent project and list management functions - so you can manage all of your lists online, and they'll be there on any machine you log into with, so your data is available wherever you are. We also have a friendly and responsive support team - if you have questions about Google's tools, it's sometimes necessary to examine many pages of their support forum before you can find the answer you're looking for.

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

I hope this helps but do feel free to drop us a line at if you have any other questions. I can't post links here, but the address to use is support at wordtracker dot com.

All the best,

Mal