Review - Adwords Analyzer

This is a tool that got me very excited when I read the sales page. Did it live up to the hype? Read on...

1. Type in a keyword or phrase that you are interested in researching.

2. Press a button.

Adwords Analyzer goes and finds related keywords and analyzes them in terms of how many people search using those keywords, how much competition there is for these keywords at Google.

Before I go on to the main part of this software, I would just like to point out that this software uses the Overture keyword tool to make its list of words and find the number of monthly searches. Overture in my opinion is heavily flawed in a few ways. Keyword counts can be vastly over-estimated in some cases (possibly due to webmasters using Overture for their own research) and keyword plurals and mispellings are lumped together. For Overture, these inflated values allow them to increase the price for bids. Good for Overture. For any software using the Overture figures, you can get a very wrong idea of what real people search for and how often. That being said, I don't think it affects this software too much. Common sense will usually tell you when a keyword is good.

OK, onto the main feature of Adwords Analyzer. This software queries Google to find out how many adwords campaigns are being run on each of the keywords. It does the same at Overture.

Google displays 8 ads per page. If Adwords Analyzer tells you that there are less than 8 ads for a particular keyword, you know you can bid on that word for the minimum 5 cents and still be on the front page of Google. Neat huh? Similarly you can use the figures for Overture to see how much competition there is for each word. I don't use Overture myself so have not really explored this part of Adwords Analyzer.

Now, here is my second big concern about Adwords Analyzer. This software queries Google search engine for its results. Google has clearly pointed out on different occasions that automatic query tools are frowned upon. Could this software get you into trouble with Google? Maybe. I am certainly not oing to be more than one research per day, possibly even less than that.

Updated 15th February 2004 - An Adwords Analyzer update introduced a time delay when querying the search engines. This now makes it much more respectful to Google than it previously was, and so may be much safer to use than previous version.

Nice features of Adwords Analyzer

You can decide which Google Datacentre to query for number of Adwords campaigns. I live in Tenerife, Spain, and if I carry out a query here, I may only get 2 - 3 campaigns being run on Google. However, those of you querying in USA may find that the same keyword has 50 campaigns. My target audience is actually USA. Adwords Analyzer allows me to change the default Google "query station" from www.google.com (with its localization filters set to Europe/Spain) to www-sj.google.com (which supposedly does not filter the results for locality). This then shows me pretty much what you American webmasters see, and I can be confident the numbers of Adwords Campaigns are right.

Another great feature is that you can import your keyword list from a text file. This is great because you can carry out your research on Wordtracker or Nichefinder first. Create a smaller list of keywords that you are interested in and then run them through Adwords Analyzer. This may help to prevent over-use of Google querying words you are not really interested in.

To sum up, I think this tool is a huge time-saver. However, I would not recommend it to any of my own clients because of the problems Google would have with this software. It is a great idea, but in my opinion it is fatally flawed. If I find out anything else from Google regarding this tool, I will add it to my review.

Updated 15th February 2004 - An Adwords Analyzer update introduced a time delay when querying the search engines. This now makes it much more respectful to Google than it previously was, and so may be much safer to use than previous version.

Read more about Adwords Analyzer

Alternative: Why not read about the Keyword Analyzer, a similar tool with more features