In PPC advertising, there is a frequent need to predict how many ad impressions will be generated by a given keyword. This basically depends on the popularity of the keyword.

Since Wordtracker has long been widely acclaimed as the best tool for performing this research, and since we already subscribe to it, we decided to correlate popularity listings in Wordtracker with impressions in Adwords.

The specific question we sought to answer was: From Wordtracker results can one predict with some accuracy how many impressions an ad will receive in Google Adwords?

Methodology

(1) Put a phrase, “Satellite TV for PC” into both the Adwords and Wordtracker engines with “Exact Matching” Bid on the phrase appropriately to ensure the Google Adwords ad appeared between positions 3 and 5 on the first page of search results

(2) Find out how many searches were counted by Wordtracker and how many impressions occurred for the ad

(3) Compare these two numbers and draw a conclusion

The results were encouraging. The Wordtracker “Count” was 292. Google Adwords received 253 impressions during one day.

Discussion

Wordtracker’s “Count” includes searches made from all over the world; our Google Adwords ad was programmed to be triggered only by searches made in India and the US. To normalize the two, it is necessary to multiply the number of ad impressions by a positive factor. 292/253 = 1.154 would work perfectly in this case.

Conclusion

For a given exact-matched keyword, Wordtracker’s “Count” and Google Adwords impressions are nearly equal. In our first attempt, their ratio was 1.154.

Further testing should be performed to make the ratio more reliable.

This article will be updated with new test results as soon as they are generated.