Market Samurai Review
The Market Samurai keyword software has been hyped up a lot since it was closely promoted on the 30 Day Challenge site. It currently retails for $147 but you may get it at $97 or $127 some time after your trial. I did not purchase Market Samurai because I tried the trial and I wasn’t really impressed with it to invest $97 to $147 of my money into it.
Here’s why…
Market Samurai has a lot of formulas and new jargons that you have to get used to. Almost everyone who is remotely familiar with SEO would know what search counts and search results mean. The search counts are daily numbers and not the usual monthly figures. Market Samurai calls search results “Search Engine Competition” or SEOC. There is this “Phrase to Broad Match Ration” or PBR, which is the ration of the number of phrase matches of your keyword to the broad matches of your keyword. I am not sure how they decided that was a good indicator.
I find these new jargons extremely confusing and I have no idea how they decided that the value of a niche can be calculated by the estimated Google AdWords CPC and Google AdWords daily traffic. You cannot believe all the stats you get from this software.
One of the things that bug me the most is I cannot see how many advertisers are bidding on a certain keyword on Google AdWords. Market Samurai does not call this field the number of advertisers. Instead, it has a fancy name of “AdWords Competition”. Here’s the big problem – The number of advertisers is given in percentage and not a hard number! How many advertisers are bidding on a keyword if you see 50% in this field?
Market Samurai does not seem to be using any Google API. If you’re using an API, you should not see the captcha pop up. What that means is the software is simulating manual Google searches through their software. There is a recommended limit of 150 keywords per search. Other keyword research software I have used allow me to set the number of seconds between a search query to prevent getting a lot of captcha requests but not Market Samurai. If you search too many keywords in a short period of time, you may run the risk of getting a “Google Block”, which would result in a temporary ban on your IP from searching on Google.com.
There are a lot unfinished modules within Market Samurai. I believe they will raise the price to above $147 when more modules are released. Overall, I do not think the Market Samurai is worth the price with all these fancy jargons, crippling flaws and flashy marketing.
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5 Comments On “Market Samurai Review”
On 8th April 2009 2:24 PM, Brent Hodgson from Market Samurai said:
Hi Vincent,
Thanks for the honest review of Market Samurai.
I think one of the problems that we have with Market Samurai is something that you pointed out – a knowledge gap problem.
Because Market Samurai is so different to anything else that’s on the market right now when it comes to keywords, I notice that when people do have difficulty with Market Samurai, it’s usually because we haven’t trained them well enough in how the software works, why it works that way, and how to use it to your advantage.
So I agree with you when you talk about the difficulties understanding some of the jargon. It does take time to learn how to use Market Samurai effectively.
You raise a lot of questions in your blog post – so let me help you by answering them.
You mentioned the phrase-to-broad match (PBR) and that you weren’t sure how we decided it was a good indicator.
We came up with PBR because it solved a problem with Broad Match keyword data.
Long story short, when people used Broad Match data, they would often find their keywords were in an odd order.
This was because broad match doesn’t take into account precise word orders of keywords (like Phrase Match does). So a keyword like “Samurai Review Market” and “Market Samurai Review” (to use this blog post as an example) would have the same traffic when looking at the broad match data.
But if you’re using the keyword “Market Samurai Review” – you want to get an insight into slight variations of that keyword (“review market samurai”, “review of market samurai”, “market samurai software review” etc).
Broad match data will tell you this.
So to get the value of broad match keyword data, AND to select the best possible word order, we did a simple ratio between the two – and it worked a charm!
People started getting their keywords in better word orders, and picking up far more traffic.
You mentioned that we use Google’s “Advertiser Competition” field.
I agree completely – this data that Google provides sucks. Even Google’s own information in this is vague, and it makes it difficult to use effectively.
But stay tuned over the next few weeks – we’re replacing it very soon with something much better (that piece of information is an exclusive for your blog
)
Finally – you mentioned API’s.
Unfortunately, the APIs that are available right now simply don’t provide accurate data.
The limit of 150 keywords can be a little restricting – so we’re looking at solutions to this at the moment.
Thanks for the review and the feedback.
Obviously we keep an eye on what people are saying about Market Samurai, and use the good and bad to improve the software.
That’s part of the reason why there are so many updates – the other part is because we’re still in beta – and as you pointed out, there are still features we need to release.
Anyway – I hope this has been valuable.
Now that you have my email address, feel free to drop me a line.
Brent
On 8th April 2009 11:31 PM, Vincent said:
If the Google APIs do not provide accurate data, then where do you get accurate Google data from?
There is a Google AdWords Keyword Tool here:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
The Google AdWords API retrieves similar data to this form. If this isn’t accurate, I don’t know what is.
On 1st May 2009 10:17 PM, tomartomartini said:
the top…most of the people get stuck on doing far too much analysis with out thinking of the end in mind first..that is the SEO Competition module WHICH TELLS US can we compete with the existing web pages ..this to my mind has been the big failing of many of the users of M/S..THAT I HAVE SEEN ON THE FORUM…the product is great but the users are very weak in their understanding of this tool.this is where Vincent and Brent miss the point ,and brent is one of the developers.
On 1st May 2009 10:19 PM, tomartomartini said:
http://www.noblesamurai.com/forum/topic/is-there-any-info-on-metrics-to-follow
these are the independent videos by the 30 DC TEAM they fully cover the practical
application of the M/S TOOL..which in the end is to find a niche to target which has a strong probability of us getting to the first page and then to the top…most of the people get stuck on doing far too much analysis with out thinking of the end in mind first..that is the SEO Competition module WHICH TELLS US can we compete with the existing web pages ..this to my mind has been the big failing of many of the users of M/S..THAT I HAVE SEEN ON THE FORUM…the product is great but the users are very weak in their understanding of this tool.this is where Vincent and Brent miss the point ,and brent is one of the developers.
On 2nd May 2009 3:03 AM, Vincent said:
I guess a lot of people have different ways on how to determine if a niche is profitable and whether the keywords related to that niche can be easily ranked on Google. I have my own formula to determine these things and I cannot get my formula to work in Market Samurai. Furthermore, I disagree with a lot of stats produced in Market Samurai. Yes, maybe I am not using it to its full potential but I don’t have to because I disagree with the information that it is returning.
The root problem with Market Samurai isn’t because the users are ineffective in their use of the software . As a developer, if the users of an application cannot use your application properly, then it is a design fault. The developer has made it too complicated for the user.
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