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Thanks Richard. Just to make sure I checked this one, but nothing changed: we were already showing 100.00% and got the same amount of impressions.

Thanks for your respond. Basically, you are saying what I said:

• "The impressions from Google WMT and Google ADW are not the same, even though they are called the same and therefore suggest they should be (about) the same."

Even though I can't really tell there should/is any difference between the "same" metrics (by judging their description), I would have to assume they are in fact something (very) different (which is too bad!).

You are totally right in your solution: don't mind comparing those two sources and you'll be fine. Still, I wanted to know if I had overlooked something and if others may have noticed this before. Or maybe some could have drawn the wrong conclusions out of these different, yet very similar Google sources, for a long time. Those should be aware of this.

Dear community,

I was doing some research within Google Webmaster Tools (WMT)  keyword data when I noticed that the impressions within this tool are quite different compared to the keyword impression data provided by Google AdWords (ADW).

Some specs about the situation:

• Date: December 2014 (31 days).

• Keyword: brand + main keyword* (e.g. amazon shoes, if Amazon would have been the client)

• Visitors come from: the Netherlands (>97%).

• Search volume: 3,8 K for this branded keyword last year (December 2013), of which >99% came from the Netherlands (source: Google Keyword Planner).

• Search query data: "impressions" for Google WMT (organic keyword impressions) and “impressions” for Google ADW (paid keyword impressions).

• Of course the ADW keyword is [exact].

So, what's wrong? The data doesn’t match, while I expected approximately the same amount of impressions assuming the keywords are:

• both [exact] keywords; (check! ✓)
• within the same period of time; (check! ✓)
• the Ad is being displayed "all the time" (check! ✓)
• the domain/page is being indexed "all the time" (check! ✓)

How much of a difference is there?

• Organic impressions: 7,4 K (source: Google WMT)
• Paid impressions: 2,1 K (source: Google ADW)

Note that the search volume according to Google Keyword Planner of last year is somewhere in between: 3,8K. The search volume from this tool of last December is not available just yet (but I don’t expect much difference here since Google Trends shows a steady search volume).

If the difference would have been 10-20%, I wouldn't be surprised at all, but this is huge.

**What could explain the differences? **

• If a lot of people were using AdBlockers (they do, but not nearly as massively (around 10%)).
• If we would have made mistakes in AdWords: budget, bidding, targeting etc. - This is not the case, got this confirmed by the manager who double-checked the data and settings. Also: since it’s a branded keyword it’s really cheap for us and easy to get high quality scores.
• If we would have made mistakes regarding indexing/crawling that would have caused an extreme loss in domain visibility in the SERP's: possibly caused by robots.txt, a noindex-tag, server problems etc. This was not the case and Google WebmasterTools says the average position was 1,0 during the complete month.
• "Something else" went wrong during that specific period of time with this specific domain. I don’t think so because I checked multiple months and multiple other domains of other clients. These gave me the same relative results (okay, some were a bit closer: 30 K paid impressions vs 62 K organic impressions for instance, still a big difference).

What other possibilities are left?

• The impressions from Google WMT and Google ADW are not the same, even though they are called the same and therefore suggest they should be (about) the same.
• AdWords just randomly fails to display and/or measure some branded ads (even though there is plenty of budget, bidding is fine and QS is 10/10).

Definitions of "impressions" for both tools according Google:

• AdWords definition of "impressions"
• WebmasterTools definition of "impressions"

Hope someone has some more suggestions or useful links! Thanks in advance!

Ektor Tsolodimos