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Search Term Discovery Quota Usage
Search Term Discovery Quota Usage

Why are more queries being used than results returned?

Jay Langridge avatar
Written by Jay Langridge
Updated over a week ago

Where is the data coming from and how does it work?

  • The data in the Search Term Discovery tool is supplied by a third-party provider, DataForSEO.

  • This data comes from two of their databases - one for SERP data and another for search term data including search volume.

  • As this data is from a third-party source, we are unable to refresh this data.

  • Position data in Search Term Discovery may vary from that in Pi for the same search terms because the data comes from different sources.

    • Position data in Pi is our own data, which is accurate and up to date.

  • Search Term Discovery shows an estimated position based on data from DataForSEO.

How is quota usage calculated in Search Term Discovery?

  • Accounts have a monthly limit. This depletes each time a query is made and refreshes at the start of the month.

  • The quota is used when submitting the form. Subsequent sorting/filtering of the same dataset will not use any extra quota.

  • The quota used is roughly proportional to the number of results returned. However, several factors affect this:

    • There is an overhead to each request that requires some additional quota. This will seem more significant where a small number of results is returned.

    • There may be several attempts to reach the 'target number of search terms' and each of these attempts will use a varying amount of quota. Therefore, if setting a large target but receiving a small number of results, you may see a larger discrepancy.

How is the result generated?

Ideas

  • The selected maximum of terms to return is a target number.

  • DataForSEO will return search terms based on the Google Ad categories associated with the seed terms.

  • We always ask for the highest search volume search terms from the result, unless a range of search volume is specified in the parameters.

  • When multiple seed terms are used, the limit is distributed across all of them to provide equal results from all the seed terms rather than some.

  • Sometimes the SERP feature columns are empty, that is because DataForSEO hasn’t scraped that search term, therefore, there is no SERP feature data to present.

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