The AdWords Traffic Estimator is a tool designed by Google to give you estimated information about specific keywords before you create an AdWords campaign. Especially information about estimated traffic levels, impressions and clicks (as well as CPCs), are all found through the Traffic Estimator.
It’s important to keep in mind that the Traffic Estimator is not 100% accurate and should only be used to give you a rough estimate for where to set your daily budget limit for your campaigns. Simply put, this tool pretty much forecasts the search volume for your keywords and helps improve your judgment when choosing your keywords.
Where to Find the Traffic Estimator Tool?
Click the Tools and Analysis tab and select Traffic Estimator from the drop-down menu.
How to Use the AdWords Traffic Estimator Tool
The steps are as easy as 1, 2, 3.
Before you Start: Targeting
The Traffic Estimator allows you to get estimates for specific locations, languages, and networks. I recommend that you use the same settings as you had in mind for your AdWords to increase the likelihood of getting acurate estimates:
- Click Locations and enter the countries, territories, regions, or cities for where you’d like to see estimates. You can add multiple locations.
- Click Languages and enter the name of the languages for which you’d like to see estimates. You can add multiple languages.
- Click Networks and choose Google Search or Google Search and Search Partners to get estimates for that network option.
Step 1
Step 2
Step 3
Step 3 Example:
As we can see in this example, if we hover our mouse over the graph, it shows us the max. CPC recommended for our budget: $1.08 (meaning that my bid for $0.50 is too low to compete). If my bid or budget is too low, like in this case, this tool will tell me that I can’t compete with that keyword.
If we increase the bid higher than $1.08, my budget will be spent too early in the day and again limit my possibilities.
Below you can observe that we can’t even see data for the average position with a CPC of $0.50.
Now, let’s see another example with the same keyword (New York Hotels); But now taking in consideration a higher bid and budget.
Besides getting a lot more clicks, we can now also see our average position, CTR, daily clicks and the daily cost associated with the increased CPC and budget.
Now the question that you need to ask yourself is:
- Can I increase my daily budget?
- Can I make my return on investment if I raised my budget?
If the answers are no, consider using less competitive keywords.
Take the Guesswork Out of Building AdWords Campaigns
Once we have completed these 3 steps, we can then ask all the questions that we put on the backburner and take the guesswork out of choosing our keywords. Be sure not to be over-reliant on estimates, and implement tests and variate on any keywords and bids within your campaigns to get a true sense of the right amount of traffic and the right bids for your keywords.
If you’re a small or medium-sized local business, it’s important to know with whom you are competing. My personal opinion for the Traffic Estimator Tool, is that it can afford you sounder judgment before fully creating your AdWords Campaign.
Also remember that low-volume keywords, or keywords with sudden spikes in searches, can reflect wrong traffic numbers as Google relies on historical search data for the Traffic Estimator.
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Hi there,
Quite some helpful information you posted. I would have a question though, regarding average position estimator. How helpful and accurate is Avg.Pos. in case of a campaign I haven’t even created yet, and of which Google has absolutely no information about? No landing-page relevancy, no ad-quality or CTR information is gathered whatsoever. Technically at this stage Avg.Pos. is based solely on bidding amount, which, if I understand correctly, is just a small part of the ad-placement algorithm. I read somewhere that account history is also taken into consideration, which I cannot even fathom why would be relevant to a new campaign/new client. Please help me out with your ideas, will you?
Hej Szillard,
Let me try to answer your questions in the best manner.
I don’t know of any average position estimators. If you could possibly send a link to it?
The Traffic Estimator Tool is by many ways flawed, which is also mentioned in the blog post.
One of the biggest flaws in the Traffic Estimator Tool is unfortunately not possible to fix. It’s due to the fact that nobody can know in advance what your CTR is going to be. If you miss your CTR calculation from 5% to 10%, then your traffic (and expenses) will double. There are big CTR fluctations based on competition, ad position, Quality Score and bid, so making too many judgements based on the Traffic Estimator Tool should be avoided.
Account History is important for your future Quality Score calculation, but if you’re just starting out then it’s of course not taken into account. The same can be argued about Quality Score. The most important factor in determining Quality Score is CTR. Before you start a campaign your CTR is unknown and Google therefore calculate your Quality Score based on the rest of the factors.
That’s also why you can see huge fluctuations in Quality Score after you activate a campaign.
I hope this answered your question – otherwise feel free to ask again!
Kind regards, Andrew
Hi,
How accurate can this tool be? You said “It’s important to keep in mind that the Traffic Estimator is not 100% accurate and should only be used to give you a rough estimate for where to set your daily budget limit for your campaigns.” So can this tool be 80% correct?
Hey Nick,
You can say it’s 80% correct. Personally I don’t use it much, but it’s a took especially new advertisers or agency consultants can use to base their budget calculations on. Most Clients aren’t happy with getting a budget estimate because that’s what your “gut feeling” is telling you