[Mattinblack]

My experience of running adwords programs for 2 years is that when I first started it the prediction was good but over the last eight months not so. Now it is such a load of bollocks that I use overture to select my keywords for adwords and then test each one because it gives me more success. I strongly suspect google now use this feature to steer newbies towards keywords that are undersubscribed, and have introduced some randomness (on some keywords you will see wildly different results from hour to hour) to stop people using it as a free stats program which make it useless for that purpose. You will note that Google have introduced a load of blurb about 'trialling adverts' to cover themselves that was not there a few months ago.

Now what I do is run £5 of adwords on each keyword that overture gives me and select the one or two for the main campaign that give me the best cost per click. Its never anything like what Google predict for each word. An example I now have a trial running on a phrase 'Kia Cars in the UK' for one of my clients. Google predict I will get ZERO clicks per day and I am getting over 100 per pound (about 120 a day £1.12). I have another for the same client running on 'cheap cars uk' that Google said last time I looked will pull 1200 clicks a day and it only manages about 20 or so but costs at googles max reccomended CPC (that puts it at position 1) £3.20 a day!

Another thing you have to remember is that googles stats dont predict for you how many times an ad is displayed but how many times its clicked. You may ask well surely one is proportional to the other - and logically this may seem right, however in reality the click through rate depends on the market and keyword and google do say they factor this in. ie. an advert for fruit in position 1 targetted on "melons" may get a clickthrough rate of 1 in 200 displays but an advert for 'Big Busty Lucy' in the same position may get 1 in 20 clickthroughs. So it doesnt give you the information you are looking for anyway, ie how many people search on a given keyword. And thats BEFORE google messed around with it all. This is why google insist that you plumb in an advert before you get the click through stats...