The daily spend that we show is an estimate of a domain's AdWords spending. It doesn't include their budget for display ads or search ads that run on other sites. Estimated budgets help size up a competitor or potential client and give you a good baseline for comparing domains.
In this video, we give a pretty detailed explanation of how we work with that data and what happens when we're wrong.
What about an ad budget without keywords?
There is a rare case where you might find a domain with an ad budget, but when you click through to find recent keywords, there are none.
This is due to a safety net we put into place with our ad budget calculations here at SpyFu. <strong>We don’t want to rush to conclusions about a domain when we don’t find any keywords for it.</strong> While a domain can suddenly turn off all ad spend at any time, that might blink off of our radar for a second but then come back strong next month. We trend a domain’s ad budget to zero over a 4 month period. Our intention is to smooth out the data to account for any hiccups.
At the time this article is being written (August 2016) we are also making major improvements to our data collection, which should improve data quality, reduce hiccups, and possibly eliminate or reduce the need for stat smoothing.