It's OK I lose it all the time!
Yippee on the commish!
I mean just going direct to Google - no tool.
So here is a Google search for
allintitle: "affiliate marketing"
allintitle: "affiliate marketing" - Google Search
752,000 competing pages with "affiliate marketing" in the meta title.
However if you search without title and without quotes - affiliate marketing has 15.4 MILLION!
15 million is how many have the term anywhere in the page so could only be a slight mention on some obscure site so not really competition that would be hard to beat if you are optimizing for the term. If it's in the title it's more serious competition because the page is either being optimized for that term or the whole page/article is about it. So that gives you a better picture of how competitive it really MAY be.
More obvious example
allintitle: "green widgets" only has 37 competing pages because it's not a real product and not something anyone would really search for, so hardly anyone has it in their title or is writing articles about it.
However if you search for green widgets (no title no quotes) it shows 6.7 MILLION competing pages. Most of those pages aren't competition for the term at all, just have those 2 words somewhere on the page - they arent really trying to rank for it.
Make sense?