Keyword Planner Data Gone Except to Active Advertisers
It first started with the change that you could no longer access the Google Keyword planner unless you had an account with AdWords. Now Google has gone so far as restricting detailed keyword reports to accounts that do not fit their criteria. The loopholes that permitted non-advertisers to see the detailed reports have ALL been closed off.
On top of that, they have installed a spending threshold that an advertiser must reach so they can continue to have the benefits of the detailed data. It’s kind of hard to understand where Google is going with this because they won’t reveal what the threshold is!
However, one advertiser was able to get a little bit of insight from their AdWords rep:
I have just spoken to a customer service manger from the Australia support help desk. They have advised me that there must be continuous activity in your Google ad-words campaign (clicks and campaigns running) for a minimum of 3-4 months continuous in order to gain focused keyword results. If you are seeing a range 10-100 or 100-1k or 1k -10k it’s likely your AdWords account does not have an active campaign or has not had continuous campaigns or clicks.
This change is affecting many SEOs who depend on the Keyword Planner’s detailed data for making important decisions on keywords and content to create. Unless you have access to an active account that is seeing the data, you will have to find another way to do your keyword research.
On another note, Google is now showing more transparency in how they report keywords combined with search variants. The data for close keyword variations are now combined and shown on one single line and Google includes a notification telling you that they have done so. At least this solves the problem of the overestimation of keywords based on volume that was going on earlier this year. The combining was already going on but Google wasn't clear on the details.
Google combines keywords as search variants in the following situations:
plurals with non-plurals for any word in the keyword phrase
acronyms with longhand version
stemming variants: -er, -ing, -ized, -ed etc keywords (ie. designer, designing, designed)
words that can be spelled with or without space (ie. car park and carpark)
words with and without punctuation (ie. kid toys and kid’s toys)
For advertisers this mig...
