About Keyword Planner forecasts

To access Keyword Planner:

Your account must be using Expert mode. You won’t be able to access Keyword Planner if your account is using Smart mode.
You must complete your account setup by entering your billing information and creating a campaign. If you’re not yet ready to spend money, you can choose to pause your campaigns.

You can use Keyword Planner to get insights into how keywords might perform. Google draws on historical search data to make estimates on what you might get from a set of keywords based on your spending. These forecasts can help you decide how to group your keywords and set your bids.

This article shows you what you can learn from your forecasts and historical search data, as well as how to fix common troubleshooting issues.

Forecasts

Your forecasted impressions take your bid, budget, seasonality and historical ad quality into account to estimate future performance. When you use Keyword Planner to get forecasts for your keywords, you'll see an overview of them on the forecast summary in the table, as well as information on what kinds of bids might help you reach your business goals.

The 'Forecast' page shows you forecasts for your plan, broken down by top keywords, locations and devices. The information is displayed in a clear dashboard, and you can change the parameters on each forecast for detailed insights into your plan’s potential success.

At the top of the 'Forecast' page, you’ll also be shown a default bid, which you can change by selecting a different point on the graph or by entering a bid in the field at the top of the page. This can help you see how your keywords might perform with higher or lower bids. The default bid is based on:

Your previous plan (if you had one);
The average maximum cost per click (CPC) from your account's manual CPC ad groups, or
The average maximum CPC across all manual bidding ad groups with the same currency.

What your keyword forecasts mean

Clicks: The number of clicks that your ad might receive each day if the keyword were to trigger the ad.
Cost: The average amount that you might spend per day for this keyword.
Impressions: How often your ad might show in a day. An impression is counted each time an ad is shown on a search results page.
Click-through rate ('CTR'): The ratio of the number of clicks that your ad might receive divided by the number of times that your ad might be shown (which are called an impression).
Average cost per click ('Avg. CPC'): The average amount you might pay for a click. The final amount that you're charged for a click is automatically adjusted, and this is known as your actual cost per click (actual CPC), so you pay only one penny more than the minimum amount required to keep your ad's position. Therefore, the displayed amount may be lower than the overall cost forecast range for all keywords, or the CPC bid already in place for your ad group.

Note

Bear in mind that historical stats like average monthly searches are only shown for exact matches. For example, let's say that your keyword is 'dark chocolate'. If you want to check that keyword's average monthly searches, you'll be shown the same exact match stats whether you use a broad, phrase or exact match type with 'dark chocolate'. Traffic forecasts like clicks and cost, on the other hand, do take into account keyword match types. For example, if you get forecasts for a list of broad match keywords, any overlap between those keywords will be taken into account.

Saved keywords

When you use Keyword Planner to get historical metrics for your keywords or campaigns, you'll see detailed statistics in a table that can help you select keywords to use in your campaign. Bear in mind that forecasts take bid, budget, seasonality and other factors into account, while historical metrics don't.

What your historical metrics mean

Average monthly searches ('Avg. monthly searches'): The average number of times that people have searched for a keyword and its close variants based on the month range as well as the location and Search Network settings that you selected. You can use this information to see how popular your keywords are during different times of the year. By default, the number of searches for the term (regardless of language) is averaged over a 12-month period.
Competition: The number of advertisers that showed on each keyword relative to all keywords across Google. Note that this data is specific to the location and Search Network targeting that you've selected. In the Competition column, you can see whether the competition for a keyword is low, medium or high.
Top-of-page bid (low range): The lower range bid – an approximation of the 20th percentile – that advertisers have historically paid for a keyword’s top-of-page bid, based on your location and Search Network settings.
Top-of-page bid (high range): The higher range bid – an approximation of the 80th percentile – that advertisers have historically paid for a keyword’s top-of-page bid, based on your location and Search Network settings.
Organic impression share ('Organic impr. share'): The percentage of times that a listing from your website showed up in web searches for a keyword. This is calculated by dividing the number of web searches that showed a listing from your website by the total number of searches for that keyword idea.
Ad impression share: The number of impressions that you've received divided by the total number of searches for the location and network that you’re targeting that matched the keyword exactly in the last calendar month. Bear in mind that the ad impression share column in Keyword Planner is different from the impression share and exact match impression share columns in campaign management, which are based on the number of impressions that you were eligible to receive for a keyword. In Keyword Planner, ad impression share is based on the search volume for that exact keyword. When you see a dash (-) in the ad impression share column, that means that there isn’t enough data to calculate this number.

An animation demonstrating how to access performance charts in Keyword Planner.

Things to bear in mind about your historical metrics

Your search volume statistics are rounded. This means that when you get keyword ideas for multiple locations, the search volumes might not add up as you'd expect.
Web traffic is influenced by seasonality, current events and a number of other factors. Therefore, the number of searches on your keywords is constantly fluctuating.
Keyword forecasts can help you determine your estimated performance. Your forecasted impressions take your bid, budget, seasonality and historical ad quality into account, but your search volume statistics don’t. Also, your search volume is determined only for exact keyword matches, while your estimated impressions are based on your selected match types.
Bid range statistics can help you decide which keywords to use for a campaign. Bid range statistics, or 'top-of-page bid (low range)' and 'top-of-page bid (high range)', can also help you choose an effective bid for your keywords. Bid range statistics take into account the bids that resulted in an ad being shown among the ads at the top of the first page of search results.
Bid range statistics show bid information from the last 30 days. You might not see bid range statistics for keywords that have limited historical bid information. Because showing an ad at the top of the first page of results is based on a combination of bid, quality score and other factors, you can use these metrics to help adjust your bids in relation to similar keywords’ quality scores.

Fix issues with traffic forecasts

In some cases, the traffic forecasts that you see in Keyword Planner may seem lower than expected or different from the traffic that your ad is actually getting. Or, you may have trouble seeing traffic forecasts altogether.

Read below to find out why you might not be seeing traffic forecasts in Keyword Planner and what you can do to fix them.

Forecasts are low

When you use Keyword Planner, you'll see approximations of the number of clicks and impressions that you might receive each day. By increasing your cost per click (CPC) bid, you can often improve your results. However, you might find that increasing your CPC bid has little effect on your traffic forecasts. This might occur for the following reasons:

Historical ad performance: In its calculations, Keyword Planner includes samples of historical ad performance for your ads and other ads using similar keywords. If the overall click-through rate (CTR) for this sampling is consistently low, you'll see lower click predictions reflected in your forecasts. Try improving your CTR, which might increase your forecasts in the future.
Search analysis: To provide accurate traffic forecasts, keyword and search patterns are monitored. Any low forecasts that you get might be due to a lack of searches for your specific keyword or keyword phrase. In this situation, add more keywords or keyword combinations. To do so, click Keyword ideas in the page menu on the left.
Google Network policies: Sites that partner with Google to show ads (search partners) have different policies for what types of ads can appear on their pages or products. For example, some search partners only accept ads without any sexual content restrictions. Keyword Planner accounts for these policy variations among search partners and displays forecasts accordingly. While advertising on the Search Network can increase your exposure to potential customers, the traffic forecasts you see may not always reflect this.

Traffic that your ad gets is different from Keyword Planner's forecasts

Keyword Planner uses information from the dynamic ads system to project possible results on Google and its search partners. Here are some reasons why your traffic forecasts may be different from your actual results:

You recently created a Google Ads account: If you're a new advertiser, your forecasts are based on historical average data for all advertisers because there isn't a sufficient amount of data about your particular business yet. You'll see a rough average for your guidance until more data is available about how your ads are performing.
Your ads run on the Display Network: Your forecasts are for the Search Network, and don't include forecasts for the number of clicks that your ads might receive on the Display Network, including placements that you choose. You can expect more traffic than what's predicted if your ads run on the Display Network as well.
You're targeting a small geographic region: You can expect results to be less accurate if you're targeting a small geographic location, simply because there's less data on which to base predictions.
You have the same, or very similar, keywords in different campaigns: Regardless of how many ads you have running on a single keyword, you'll be shown only one on each search results page. This means if you have similar or identical keywords in different ad groups or campaigns, your keywords are competing against each other. While Keyword Planner tries to account for competition among similar and identical keywords that appear across ad groups in the same campaign, its forecasts for these keywords might be less accurate. Keyword Planner doesn't look at keywords across campaigns, so cross-campaign competition won't be accounted for in your forecasts.
Your plan or keyword list contains similar keywords that you're getting traffic forecasts for: If you estimate clicks for two or more similar keywords, Keyword Planner tries to predict how traffic will be divided between the overlapping terms. As a result, your forecasts will be less accurate.
A full week of data is averaged to provide a daily forecast: Forecasts are based on one week of data, and are averaged to provide daily forecasts. Day-to-day traffic will vary, so consider an entire week's average rather than a single day's forecast.

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