Semrush.com Traffic Cost - What exactly does it mean?
-
Hi there mozzers..Been struggling with what seems as a simple question:
Whilst using semrush to estimate competitors spend on Paid PPC it seems that the numbers they provide are way off from what reality is.For example, i have a client who spend approx £2,000 per month on Google PPC (so i know exactly the figure) however, the SEMRUSH indicates a monthly spend of $41 (yes USD).
-
Hello,
I hate to dig up an old thread but I've been attempting to personally monitor channels outside of our own and hopefully I can shed some light on two issues here - CPC and our Support. By the way, I'm SEMrush's Director of Customer Success so this hits close to home.
First, it seems that the OP is wondering about our metric for Ads Traffic Price (not the keywords CPC specifically) which is an estimation of what a domain is spending on the AdWords activity that we're able to identify for the advertiser. That's extremely important to keep in mind. We get this information from the outside-looking-in, using a database of over 120 million keywords worldwide. 40 million of those are in the US database. Other regional databases contain anywhere between 1 and 6 million keywords.
The formula is simple - Position determines CTR, then we multiply that by the search volume and then multiply that again by the average Cost Per Click. We do that calculation for each keyword and then total it all up. It's never going to be exact. We couldn't possibly account for all keywords in a campaign and we can't account for Quality Score. But, when you understand what it represents and how accurate the trending is, it's really powerful information.
About Support - we process thousands of cases per month via email and spend roughly 80 hours per week on the phone with customers from all over the world. Support is available Monday through Friday from about 3AM-8PM EST (17 hours per day!) and Weekends from 10am-6pm EST. There's absolutely no reason you shouldn't reach us. I genuinely apologize if you've experienced this. If it's any consolation, I'll be happy to look into it. Please feel free to contact me at david_black@semrush.com.
-
I rang and emailed several times. Then stopped paying my account - but yes I eventually got through.
Yes, if you type in "health insurance" (as a keyword in Australia). You will see two numbers top left box - CPC = 6.87. Then in the box under it is states Health insurance = 5.75. Two different numbers for CPC on the same page! for the same keyword. That is the error that said they would fix. Still would not tell me which one was meant to be accurate...
I add the average CPC for that keyword is well above that number.
So yes, a guide but not much else for CPC. Because we can check it on Adwords... monitor it all there.
Hope that helps.
-
Thanks for that John. You were lucky to actually get through to semrush support. i tried a few times and all i get is an answering machine. :(.
Are you saying that they actually told you that the data they collect has an error with it that is pending a fix?
-
You are correct. Also Semrush gives two CPC numbers for each keyword on the same page. I actually rang Semrush about ti, and they said it was on their to fix list. That was 6 months ago and still has not been fixed.
Just use Semrush as an indicator. I find it is reasonable for competitive traffic and not so accurate for low volume keyword traffic. Though in your case - it seems not at all. It would be impossible to get right as many keywords fluctuate widely depending on season.
Not sure if I helped but there are significant inconsistencies in the CPC data.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Ahrefs Much Higher Than Competitors But Competitors Doing Significantly More Traffic?
Hey guys, I'm baffled by checking my Ahrefs ratings lately. It looks like our rating just went up considerably... from over 1 million to now around 500k. One of my main competitors, however, has a much lower Ahrefs rank (over 3 million) but he does a considerable more amount of traffic than we do... how is this? My domain rating is higher than his by a lot. Very curious how this works.
Competitive Research | | jfishe19880 -
What is the best website traffic measurement tool?
Now that my beloved Compete.com is done I'd love to know your favorite free website traffic measurement tool. PS, please don't say Alexa! 🙂
Competitive Research | | vinadvisor0 -
Why does this site atlantapestcontrol.com rank so high?
I have been doing competitive research on the keyword phrase "atlanta pest control" this website atlantapestcontrol.com is #1. Why? The number 2 website makes some sense for its rank, but this one does not.
Competitive Research | | SammyL300660 -
What's the value of Exact Match Keyword Domains vs. Company Name Domains?
Hey Mozers, I was in a discussion this morning about the value of Exact Match Keyword domains vs. a company name domain and wanted to get a little more clarification. Let's say we are doing a site for a company called Favored Dental, and they have had the domain favoredental.com for quite a while and have their authority built up in it. Is it better to have favored-dental.com or favoreddental.co or keep its current form? The reasoning behind the alternate domains would be they have the exact match keyterm, in this case lets say "Favored Dental" is the keyterm we were going after. To my knowledge EMDs aren't as relevant as they'd use to be as Google would rather branding of companies instead of keyterm domains? Is this correct, or do EMDs of keywords you're going after hold higher authority? Thanks for the clarification!
Competitive Research | | MonsterWeb280 -
Do search engines factor traffic into rankings?
Do websites which draw a large number of visitors get higher rankings (or "points") than websites which get less visitors?
Competitive Research | | Inyankara0 -
Adwords traffic estimator tool
I tried looking for traffic estimates - attached is a screenshot - http://imgur.com/rTlUw I need help in analyzing if the Daily Clicks which shows .08? what does this mean that not even 1 click can be accomplished for this keyword if I put it under the adwords campaign? Can anyone explain that to me please. Also how exactly do I keep track of CTR how will this influence my campaign
Competitive Research | | shanky10 -
8500+ seomoz errors and still rank one for high traffic keywords
I plugged a competitor into the campaign manager that is ranking #1 for many target keywords like "sprinkler parts" (18k broad, 720 exact) and "sprinklers"(550k broad, 4400 exact) and #2 for "sprinkler"(1mil broad, 8100 exact). This site has over 8500 errors on SEOmoz - I have spent a good deal of time fixing errors on all of our client websites and have gotten them down to 0 errors. I am just wondering if I have been wasting my time and if the errors that SEOmoz reports on even make a difference. How can a site rank for such high traffic keywords when it has 4k duplicate content and 4k duplicate page title errors? The site has 75 linking root domains according to opensiteexplorer. any help on this would be greatly appreciated!
Competitive Research | | Splashme-1391910 -
Best Traffic Estimation Tool
Hello, What is the best system/tool to estimate traffic to a site, something more accurate than Alexa rank. This is of course assuming that one does not have access to the site's Google Analytics data, Thanks, Carl
Competitive Research | | CarlLarson0