Semrush.com Traffic Cost - What exactly does it mean?

[artdivision]

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).

I7StmZG

[DavidBlack]

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.

[ClaytonJ]

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.

[artdivision]

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?

[ClaytonJ]

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.