On the first week of July 2008, the Internet Marketing community received great news: the Keyword Tool in Google’s AdWords started to show real numbers for search volumes instead of shaded bars.

Emails were sent to all the marketing and advertising mailing lists, giving their subscribers the good news. One of these emails predicted that “it probably spells the end for services like Wordtracker.” A well-known guru expressed his excitement: “Holy cow! Talk about shaking up the planet!”

Jim Morris, who is undoubtedly a keyword research authority and the founder of Nichbot.com, celebrated the breaking news on his blog: “All of a sudden - there is no longer any confusion about how many times people are searching for a certain keyword phrase on Google.com.”

Mr. Morris included in his post a screenshot of 8 results the Tool returned when he had asked for keyword suggestions for the term “blogging.” Here they are: blogging, blogs, blog, blogging software, radio blog, pink is the new blog, blog search, bad girls blog. Three columns follow the keywords list: Advertiser Competition, Approx Search Volume for last month, and Approx Average Search Volume.

Prior to July 2008, these 3 columns showed a shaded green bar, which somehow represented the volumes, i.e. if the bar was fully shaded it must have indicated very high volume; an empty bar indicated no competition etc. Now, the columns of search volume include actual numbers, while the Advertiser Competition column still shows shaded bars.

I went through the suggestions Jim Morris got for “blogging” and checked a couple of them. For instance, the Advertiser Competition bar next to “radio blog” is painted 3/4 green. Looks like quite a lot of bidders on this keyword, doesn’t it? One expects to find a lot of ads when “radio blog” is searched. Well, not necessarily. There is not even one ad for “radio blog” (at least there were none on 7/8/2008, when the blog was published and I conducted my search). Not in the U.S. nor in the UK or Canada.

The next keyword phrase I checked was “bad girls blog.” The mysterious bar is 50% green, representing more than light competition (Or does it? Nobody knows what it actually represents. The question is, why is it a secret? Why doesn’t Google tell its customers the exact volume of competition?) Anyway, in the case of “bad girls blog,” again, there is not even one ad in the English speaking countries.

If Google were just a search engine, that wouldn’t be a problem at all. But Google sells its AdWords services to hundreds of thousands of people, who have to rely on the data supplied to them by Google in order to set up smart and profitable campaigns. If these data are incorrect, chances are many thousands of advertisers spend a fortune in vain.