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
-
Looking for traffic estimator for specific pages or subdomains on a site I do not control
I'm looking for a free traffic estimator that allows me to look at monthly visits for specific pages or subdomains on a site I do not control. So far I've found trafficestimate.com, but that only lets me look at domains. I'd like to see estimates for subdomains or specific pages. Does this even exist?
Competitive Research | | JGoldberg0 -
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 -
SEMRUSH--- Tool Review
Please review this tool on your personal experiences with it. I used it on my domain and it reported Search Engine traffic as 10% of it's real (google analytics) traffic. I haven't really mastered GA or SEMRush but I am getting a bad taste. Please indicate your experiences. Tell me what you use the tool for. What are it's competitors etc...
Competitive Research | | JML11790 -
Best way to check a sites traffic that you dont own. (Canadian Site)
We are looking for a way to get the estimated traffic for some sites in our niche. Usually we use compete.com or spyfu, but they only track traffic in the US. Does anyone know a way we can get traffic estimates in Canada? Thanks in advance.
Competitive Research | | ClaytonKendall0 -
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 -
How can I estimate a domain's overall organic search traffic - any tools?
Most of my analysis revolves around looking at rankings for specific keyword phrases that I've identified as important/relevant. But it'd be nice to be able to look at a domain and get a sense for how much organic traffic they get overall. If they're not ranking for the keywords I'm researching but have a lot of organic traffic that would be a nice signal to me that they are probably targeting other phrases more or have a big brand presence or something. Any suggestions? Thanks! Jeff Gibson
Competitive Research | | jeff.gibson0 -
"keyword" - rank the home page or sub page domain.com/keyword?
One of my clients has a pretty decent website that ranks 1st place for most major keywords in their line of business. EXCEPT one keyword that i've been struggling to get 1st position on Google (currently 2nd). My problem is: let's say "tennis shoes" as a keyword the home page of course has several other shoes listed but I've seen that Google took my home page and made it 2nd position (on 1st page). Where the section domain.com/tennis-shoes is on 2nd page of Google. My question is should i rel cannonical from the /tennis-shoes section to the home page so it focuses more on the specific keyword that i need to get the home 1st? Or should i leave the home page generic and focus more on /tennis-shoes to get that 1st position? What do you Moz'ers Think?
Competitive Research | | mosaicpro0 -
In Open Site Explorer, what does it mean when a linking page does not contain any reference to the URl entered?
When running Open Site Explorer on a particular URL, I get a list of linking pages. Many of these pages have a high Page Authority. I am assuming that this is a list of pages that presumably link to the URL I entered. First, is this correct? Next, when I click on an entry in the list I don't see any reference to the URL on the page, even viewing the page source. What does this mean and why is the link in the list?
Competitive Research | | jkenyon1