SEOmonitor makes sure the search data pulled from Google Ads is processed correctly within the Rank Tracker and would not mislead users.

Google Ads search volume data is reliable, and it’s the only trustworthy source available. However, it can easily become misleading when used outside Google Ads’ platform. Our system detects the 2 possible errors and processes them accordingly.

Google Ads aggregates the search volume of all close variants of the main keyword. So for “books”, Ads would show the sum of the search volumes for “books”, “book” and all of their misspellings (boks, blocks, etc.). And this same value (sum of search volumes) would be shown for “book” alone.

This means that, if a user tracks both “book” and “books”, they would get the search volume of both keywords reported on each one ad, in turn, doubling the total search volume for these keywords. This would further distort keyword group-level metrics, such as a keyword list’s total search volume and a website’s Visibility on it.

Our systems detect this by analyzing:

Based on that data, it aggregates the keywords, just like Google Ads does it.

By default, only the main keywords are listed in the Rank Tracker; there is an option (an "ungroup" button next to the search bar in the keyword table) to temporarily unnest them, for exporting purposes, for example.

Google Ads does not let their users advertise on keywords that are considered dangerous, like “cannabis” or “bitcoin”, or can block other keywords for reasons similar to this one, like blocking ads on baby-related products. When they don’t let their users bid on them, they also don’t show the search volume data.

These lists of products and/or services is dynamic. Some go in, and some go out.

Now, with the search volume being an average of the past 12 months, it can’t get to 0 in less than 12 months. So when that suddenly happens, we don’t overwrite the last non-zero value we got and we keep that until it gets a new non-zero value.

However, it comes with a "warning" instead of the Year-over-Year trend, and the search seasonality is removed as well. The tooltip for the warning would explain the situation and show when was the last time when the value was updated. We already know it’s not “0”, and overwriting the search volume with “0” would erroneously affect the Visibility metric.

As future development, we will enable our users to manually overwrite the search volumes (only in this situation) with estimates from other tools, like Google Search Console, or even Clickstream data. Even though they are not as accurate as the Ads data, in some cases they might be better than old or no data at all.