Ad spying tools are incredibly useful tools for anyone who advertises on the search engines.  You can use them to see what your competition is doing, and take advantage of their pay per click research to help your own campaign.  This allows you to save time and effort which can be applied to other things.  Why spend time doing all the work yourself, when the hard work has already been done for you?

There are several pay per click spying tools out there.  Some are web based, while others are software programs that you download and run from your own system.  All of them work using the same basic premise.  Ads that appear near the top of Google for example, over a number of days in a row are more than likely to be successful for that advertiser.  Who would be spending money for these top spots if they were losing money?  

By using an ad spying tool, you can automatically keep track of what ads are being shown for specific keywords on a daily basis.  After the tool has collected data for a long enough period of time (10-14 days), you should be able to quickly figure out which competitors are the most successful and for which keywords.  Once you have that info, you can examine the ad copy they are using as well as their landing page.  As you can see, this knowledge can be very helpful for your own PPC campaign.

Lets take a look at some different Ad Spy Tools that I have used myself and see what they have to offer.

iSpionage - This is the most expensive tool of the group and will cost you about $75 a month to use.  It does offer several advantages however.  First of all, it is web based, so you can use it regardless if you are on a PC or Mac.  It will run its scans automatically, unlike desktop software which require you to have it open before it will do its scan.  In addition, it supports Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN Adcenter along with Google Adwords.  

PPCKahuna Software - This tool is part of the PPC Kahuna pay per click training membership.  It is for Windows only and works on Google Adwords.  It is relatively easy to use and there are several videos on the site that show you different strategies for using the software.  What I like most about PPC Kahuna are its great filtering capabilities that help you easily find what you need.  It is also updated very often, so expect it to be more powerful in future releases.

Affiliate Espionage - This is a cool little tool that has a whole host of competitive intelligence features.  It only costs $9.97 which is very affordable for what it can do. Since it is a Firefox extension, it works on all major platforms.  Affiliate Espionage tracks the ads that it sees as you make searches.  You can also input in your own keywords and have it scan during a certain time period. The extension supports the 3 major pay per click platforms (Google, Yahoo and MSN Adcenter) and it works by annotating the ads in your search results with useful data.  The disadvantage of this tool, is that all the information is not in a central place, which makes it harder to find what you want than the first two tools.

Traffic Travis - This is a handy tool that any affiliate marketer should be using.  It is a desktop software that you download to your own computer to use.  What makes it great, is that it is completely free!  The Ad spy tool part of Traffic Travis is located in the PPC Analysis module. I would recommend that you try it first as new pay per click marketer.  It only works with Google however, and it is not quite as easy to use as iSpionage or PPC Kahuna if you are tracking several campaigns at once.  

I’ve used all four of the tools above, and they all have their own strengths and weaknesses.  Ad spying tools are not a silver bullet for success, but you should definitely be use one.  If you are looking for something affordable, I would recommend trying either Traffic Travis or Affiliate Espionage.  Once you start having success with your PPC Campaigns, then you can take a look at the more expensive tools and take advantage of their increased power.

No TweetBacks yet. (Be the first to Tweet this post)

Technorati Tags: , , , , , ,

Tagged with: • • • • • •

Filed under: Pay Per Click

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!