Why do I see dramatic differences in impressions between Google Webmaster Tools and Google Insights for Search?

[ir-seo-account]

Has anyone else noticed discrepancies between these tools? Take keyword A and keyword B. I've literally seen situations where A has 3 or 4 times the traffic as B in Google Webmaster Tools, but half the traffic of B in Google Insights for Search.

What might be the reason for this discrepancy?

[PreetSibia]

Are you checking impressions or click through in webmaster tools ? Try to use other analytical tool and see the difference.

[AaronSchinke]

Google Keyword tools are estimates at best. I would not rely on them as your sole source of traffic estimation. A lot of times Google will say that there are 1000's of searches for a particular keyword and even if you rank first you might only see a couple clicks. It's the nature of the beast. As nice as these tools are to have, it will always come down to some testing on your part.

[FranktheTank-47497]

In my experience, the only accurate tool is goole analytics (or other analytics software, of course). Webmaster tools is helpful for sitemap and crawling related issues, but I wouldn't trust the keywords section too much.

This is even more the case for insights for search, these numbers are mostly usable to see trends, but not detailled analytics. You might want to use the google adwords tool instead, probably more reliable than the latter two: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Hope this helps!