A couple of weeks ago, the Internet marketing world had been hit by what seemed to be wonderful news: Google AdWords Keyword Tool started showing actual numbers instead of vague graphs for search volume.

I have received a lot of emails from newsletters I subscribe to, informing me of the great change. One of the senders was excited enough to conclude: “it probably spells the end for services like Wordtracker.” A famous guru could not hide his joy: “Holy cow! Talk about shaking up the planet!”

Jim Morris, a keyword research authority, posted the following on his nichbot.com 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.

Until July 2008, all three columns used to show a shaded bar, which was supposed to indicate the relative volumes, i.e. if the bar was completely green it supposedly indicated very high volume; half green equaled moderate volume etc. But now, the two search volume columns show actual numerical figures, while the first column, Advertiser Competition, still shows this shaded bar.

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.