Remember last Tuesday we reported that Google Keyword Planner Showing Data Ranges For Advertisers Without Campaigns - in short, they were showing less traffic estimate data to some advertisers. I was hoping it was a bug, but it was not.
Google said late on Friday, which is what they normally do when they want a bad thing to kind of go away, that this is not a bug but a change to "ensure that AdWords advertisers are able to get the data they need to optimize their accounts." Love the spin, right?
Elizabeth from Google posted this in the Google AdWords Help forums. She said there is an update to the keyword planner tool.
First she said "previous technical issues affecting the Keyword Planner tool are now resolved." That line is specifically aimed to confuse AdWords advertisers on this topic. She is referring to the previous bug removing access. So after the backlash there, they decided to throttle advertisers who signed up for Google AdWords but is not spending enough money with Google.
She said "advertisers with lower monthly spend may see a limited data view in the Keyword Planner. For example, you may see values such as 0, 1-100, 100-1K, 1K-10K, 10K-100K, 100K-1M, 1M+ in the average monthly searches column. In addition, other advertisers may trigger the limited data view by reaching a limit on the number of searches for search volume data (specifically, requests to our API)."
Again, how useful is this chart:
Compare that to this:
Again, Google said "these changes will ensure that AdWords advertisers are able to get the data they need to optimize their accounts."
Everyone Google said that to wants to know how that is the case? Google has not responded to those questions.
Forum discussion at Google AdWords Help.
