Search volume

The phrase has two uses in this industry. In keyword research it means how many times a term is searched each month on Google or Bing, a rough measure of how many people care about a topic and how many advertisers are likely to bid on it.

Inside an arbitrage business it means the number of searches the operator's own pages send to the search feed. In a two-click flow, every click on a related search term is one search. This number is the base of the feed's metrics: Coverage is the share of searches that return ads, and RPS is revenue per search.

Feeds watch a partner's search volume closely. A new partner often starts under a feed cap, a limit on daily searches, which is lifted as quality is proven. Sudden jumps are a red flag for the feed, since a real audience rarely doubles overnight. Searches that no real person made are query fraud. Growth in search volume should always be explainable by growth in spend on an approved traffic source.

An example

Say 10,000 daily visits with a 45% lander CTR generate 4,500 searches. Under a feed cap of 4,000 searches a day, 500 would go unmonetised, so the buyer should hold spend near 8,900 visits until the cap is raised.