What’s the Price of Love?

If you want to advertise on Valentines’ Day, what’ll it cost you? We entered 20 terms into Google Adwords’ Traffic Estimator and got some cost data. Then we put the terms into groups describing Love, Friendship, Dating, Gifts, and Breakups. Then we graphed the data. Yes, there is something wrong with us. And please forgive for the pink and red colors throughout—at least we didn’t use little heart icons everywhere.

Keywords relating to Dating are the most expensive to buy, and "online dating" is the most expensive of the bunch. That’s no surprise: Match.com, eharmony and their peers are all trying to lure you to their site. And Gifts are expensive, too. Higher cost-per-click (CPC) figures mean that advertisers have figured out how to make money buying these terms. Searching for "flowers" on Valentines’ Day? Chances are good you’ll buy something.

Terms related to love (passion, love, marriage, crush, and romance) get high search volume. But they’re cheap, from a CPC perspective. That’s probably because advertisers haven’t found a good way to make money on the squishy, goofy feeling of love itself—they only make money on the pursuit of love through dating and gifts.

Can we find the value of passion, love and dating through Adwords? Perhaps not. But it does provide some nice eye candy on Valentines’ Day.