High-Paying Keywords, Part 2 (series)

Today's focus is on the pricing side of high-paying keyword lists. Specifically, we'll answer two questions: Where do they get their pricing information? and Are the lists accurate? (Let me state up front that I think the lists are useful, but not in the way you think.) Be sure to read Part 1 of this series before continuing.

High-Paying Keyword Scraping

As I mentioned yesterday, keyword lists are almost always obtained by scraping data from an advertising service. “Scraping”, by the way, refers to a program that fetches pages from a website just like a web browser does but doesn't display the page, it instead extracts data from the page. The scraped site can't tell that it's being scraped as long as the scraper doesn't bombard it with too many page requests. An alternative to scraping, depending on the source of the data, is to use an “application programming interface” (API) like the AdWords API, however the data you really want may not be in the API and the API usually forbids you from building lists like high-paying keyword lists. (Technically speaking, scraping is usually verboten as well — Google's own terms of service for its search engine state that “You may not send automated queries of any sort to Google's system without express permission in advance from Google.” This doesn't stop the scrapers, of course.)

What do the scrapers do? They basically pretend they're setting up an advertising campaign, place bids for keywords, and then extract the pricing data
for those keywords. They update a database with the information and then proceed to the next set of keywords.

The trick is to do this slowly so that the advertising service doesn't notice it's being hit by an automated system. You have to throttle your calls to the service. The more keywords you have in your list, of course, the longer it takes to update the information. If you're serious about this you'll spread the work of collecting keyword information across several different machines, each collecting a different set of information, thereby updating the entire list that much more quickly.

Are High-Paying Keyword Lists Accurate?

This is the question that keyword lists buyers ask all the time. The short answer is “yes and no”.

Yes, the keyword lists are accurate in the sense that they scrape information directly from the advertising service. So assuming that the ad service is accurate, then the list is accurate. For an advertiser, at that particular moment in time.

No, because most people using keyword lists are not advertisers and because the information in the lists is used long after it was collected.

Again, this doesn't mean that the lists aren't useful, but you certainly can't take them as the Gospel truth. Tomorrow, I'm going to discuss the many reasons why AdSense publishers need to treat high-paying keyword lists with a certain level of skepticism.

Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense.

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