Capitalisation of campaign keywords - why does this affect traffic but not rankings?

[ContactOnline]

Having accidentaly entered keywords into my campaign with both upper-case initial letters ("Product Design") and lower-case initial letters ("product design") I find that the rankings are, as expected, identical.

However, the traffic generated by the keywords is markedly different.

Does this mean that the two versions of the keyword should be treated like totally seperate keywords in future?

Indeed, should I be entering all variants of capitalisation into future keyword campaigns (such as "product Design" and "Product design") if I wish to get the full picture in future?

Any answers would be welcome.

David in Scotland

[lavellester]

Hey David,

sorry but I don't understand - where are you seeing the difference in traffic.  Its been one of those days.  I'll catch on in sec!

cheers

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Alan, it's an odd response. The traffic numbers are pulled from Google Analytics. My belief was that GA is capitalization agnostic - meaning it doesn't matter if the keyword is capitalized or not. Let's see if we can get an SEOmoz engineer to weigh in.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Alan, saw this question in the queue and realized it was never answered. Are you still having difficulty? I can try pinging one of the engineers again.

[adamf]

Sorry for the very late response, but wanted to let you know that I took a look into this and it appears that there is a bug in the ranking overview which makes it so we only shows the visit data for the first of two duplicates (differing only by capitalization) that is added. The first will show the number of visits and the second will display a value of "pending".

As for the data itself, if you go to the ranking history for the 2 keywords, it should show the same historical visit data (and has in our tests), so this is consistent with how we should be displaying this.

There is certainly no need to be tracking different capitalizations separately, as our GA data collection is not case sensitive.

If you are still seeing something odd aside from the pending on the overview, please let me know.

Thanks for catching this and bringing it to our attention!

Adam