Also, evaluating your target market based on a single keyword seems pretty silly and meaningless. What about related or synonymous keywords? What about other traffic sources like banner ad media buys?
>> What about related or synonymous keywords?
This post does not go into detail on the full approach for measuring a market. That's detailed in my book and way too long to include in a blog post.
This post simply talks about the 4 most common mistakes people make when doing this kind of research. Nowhere did I indicate your entire market research depends on this single keyword. That would be stupid.
>>What about other traffic sources like banner ad media buys?
There are at least 50 other traffic sources: Twitter, blogging, podcasting, other search engines, magazine ads, TV ads, radio ads, cold calls, direct mail, Facebook pages, Facebook ads...I could go on and on.
None of them offer data that allows you to easily perform market research. Also, unless you are funded many of them are completely out of reach.
Again, Google is not the only source of traffic but it's an easy way to measure market demand.
Always seemed more accurate to me.
"The Google AdWord Keyword Tool doesn’t show you how many people search Google for this term each month. It shows you how many AdWords ad impressions are available. And that includes Google’s search partners, content partners, and the entire AdSense content network."
For many startups --as they often operate on new markets-- the size of the "target audience" is probably more interesting. In the markets the 'size' (in money) is also quite hard to measure. But in developed markets the 'size' is probably more interesting.
I haven't heard that distinction, but I'll consider using your suggested alternatives in the future.
At the same time, I wonder if using a longer phrase like the "number of potential customers" would actually make the article less readable. I imagine most people knew what I meant by the term "market size" based on the context.
It was definitely not "this is precisely the thing that I had been hoping for 10 years somebody would code up."
If you had tried to estimate the number of potential twitter users by counting up the number of people in the world who were search for a service that would publish their SMS-length plain text messages on a web site, you would have gotten nowhere meaningful.
