Keyword Planner Data Limited for Low Spend Advertisers

Google dashed the hopes and dreams of many SEOs last month when they took the normally precise keyword volume data offered in their Keyword Planner Tool and reduced it to broad (mostly useless) numbers for any Advertisers not spending enough with them. They explained it as, “Advertisers with lower monthly spend may see a limited data view in the Keyword Planner”. For example, instead of seeing the Monthly Searches as 18,100 those without a paying AdWords account will now see 10K-100K like this:

Data with a non-restricted AdWords account:

Data with a restricted AdWords account shared by SEMPost:

The Keyword Planner data has been all over the place. In July Google suddenly removed ALL access to the tool to non-advertisers, but later called it a bug and fixed it. Google also updated the tool to group the results and duplicating numbers for similar keywords like cats and cat, which is enough to make any dedicated keyword researcher pull their hair out. In fact, here is an excellent article on how to get around that change. So, as you can imagine many hoped this shift to restricted data was just another bug. However, Google put those thoughts to rest when they published this thread.

It seems the technical bugs have since been resolved, but there have been reports of Google returning the above limited data results if you've hit the Keyword Planner with too many inquiries like when using their API. No idea what the parameters are around 'too many inquiries' but if you run into this issue then at least you know why. During our own testing we've found that it doesn't take much to get past this paid ...