Adwords reporting is ever more useful

Inside AdWords: Discover your share of voice with Impression Share reporting

One of the problems I had while doing initial research prior to starting my company's Adwords campaign was finding out how many searches keywords actually get each day/week/month. If the keywords don't receive significant traffic, which is usually the case for keywords that are regionally focused, it is often hard to find traffic statistics.

Here's an example of my dilemma. The number of people searching for [used cars] is going to be immense across the whole country. Bob Smith's Used Cars in Des Moines, IA, is not going to really benefit from bidding for that keyword phrase. He would benefit from bidding on a phrase that was obviously aimed at finding used cars in the Des Moines region. However, traffic on [Des Moines used car dealers] is going to be substantially less than [used cars], which is good, in this case. Bob wants to draw from the subset of people looking for the latter keyword, and he doesn't want to mess with anyone searching for the former.

However, what if the town is substantially smaller - like, say, a suburb of a metro area? What if you wanted data on keywords related to convenience stores in Riverdale, Maryland? I doubt you can find much data using whatever tools are available to the general public. Wordtracker and Overture will probably tell you there's too little data to make a calculation.

But now, I can use the Google's Impression Share data to see how often my ad is displayed compared to the total number of available impressions in the market. This gives me an exact idea of how much traffic my keywords get each day, which is exactly what I wanted on the front end. Yes, I did have to actually put the money down first in order to get this data, but it's still a valuable metric to have, and it helps me know what I had wanted to find out originally.