I’ve put together a short video showing how the Microsoft adCenter Labs Keyword Forecast tool works. It gives you the same sort of data you get from Google Trends - it shows you how searches on specific keywords have trended over the last few months, and this lets you do a rough and ready prediction of where that keyword is going in the near future.

This Microsoft offering is quite different from Google Trends. First, the data used by MS (right now anyway) seems to be at least 6 months old. Google Trends gives you a more current trend line.

But Google Trends doesn’t give you any actual search volume numbers. They removed this information from Adwords about a year ago, and they don’t provide it here either. So in GT you can see the “trend”, but you have no idea of how many searches are being done on a search term without using another tool that actually gives you those numbers.

MS Keyword Forecast gives you the numbers, although they don’t tell you where they come from, and it is not likely they are very accurate. The same can be said of the numbers you get from other tools such as Wordtracker or Adwords Analyzer. The search volume numbers are really only useful because they show you relative search volume numbers. For example, in the video linked above we see that “sending flowers” gets much less search volume than “send flowers”. Google Trends doesn’t give us that information.

The MS tool will also let you graph two or three search terms together so you get a direct comparison of the search volume for the terms, and the way they are trending.

Click on the image above to watch a short video about MS Keyword Forecast.