On January 5th, a PR firm that I do AdWords consulting for, presented me with this problem:
A client of theirs was facing negative press related to alleged corporate malfeasance. The story had been in the press for about 10 months, but heated up in December when a state attorney general announced he would be filing suit.
The public relations firm asked me to do some basic research into how people are finding the story in search engines. My first instinct was to check the Google External Keyword Tool to see local search trends for the past 12 months and see which search phrases were getting more searches in December, but I ran into a problem.
I took an initial list of keyword phrases suggested by the client and expanded the list with variations, terms I found in news stories, and my own instincts as to what people would search for. I entered that list into the Google External Keyword Tool, downloaded the data into Excel, and Voila!
…Except it wasn’t Voila!, it was more like Huh?
When you download keyword suggestions from Google’s Keyword Tool, among the many columns of data are columns for each of the past 12 months with local search volume data for those months. As the screenshot below shows, this “shows a keyword’s fluctuation in traffic over the past 12 months.”
The curious thing was that there was a column for December 2010, but the data was all blank.
At first, I thought it might be might be related to the topic. Average monthly search volumes were less than 55 searches for most of the 200+ phrases I was analyzing. Maybe Google is slower to release data for lower volume terms?
But that hypothesis didn’t pan out. Proper names related to the story, which normally get thousands of searches per month, also showed no results for December. Further, I tested known high volume terms (e.g. “wedding favors”) and found the same phenomenon.
I then went back and looked at some prior keyword analysis I’d done, including an analysis from October 14 (for a different client and situation). Sure enough — September data was blank.
I’m surprised I never noticed this before. Well, it’s possible I had, but it hadn’t really paid much attention because my keyword analysis missions hadn’t been so specific about examining the prior month’s search volumes.
I emailed a contact at Google who is an Account Planner in the AdWords group and told him what I was seeing. He said we can usually expect the prior month’s data by mid-month. Based on that, this month appears to be behind schedule. It’s now January 22, and still no December data.
In an upcoming post, I’ll talk about how I was able to use Google Insights to provide some actionable data without absolute search volume numbers (Insight and Trends only show relative data). Interestingly, both of those tools have shown December data since January 5th, when I first started my analysis.
Updates:
