Keyword Planner - Grouping Search Volume for Close Variants?

[MaryAnne G]

Is this new or am I losing my mind? It was first brought to my attention yesterday by a couple of people in a forum I moderate who regularly use AKP.

The Adwords Keyword tool is returning search volume totals for close variants instead of separate values per keyword. Makes sense from an Adwords standpoint (since they use close variants for all match types), but I think it's new in this tool?



Doesn't matter what match type you use when you enter them, and entering some variants as negative match doesn't change it either (unless you null out your entire list).

I was doing a lot of keyword research last week - I think this would have jumped out at me!

BTW, if you add the individual keywords to your plan and download your plan, the CSV will have the ungrouped search volume per keyword:



However, if you click "download" from ABOVE the list of results, you get the grouped values as shown on-screen.

??

 

[mborgelt]

This is news to me. Good catch, I know they were planning on making some changes to AdWords as a whole but I didn't know the dashboard would be a part of these changes.

 

[MaryAnne G]

I had screenshots in there - for whatever reason I can't see them. Here's the on-page results

And the same downloaded to a plan ...

 

[MaryAnne G]

It's official - Adwords keyword planner is pretty much toast for keyword research - be careful if you're using it or any tools which rely on it.

Google's Keyword Planner Now Combines Keywords for Search Volume

And the loophole I found a few weeks ago has been "fixed."