How To Discover Your Competitors’ Pay Per Click Campaigns and Profit
Ad spying tools are essential tools for any pay per click marketer. You can use them to see what other advertisers are doing, and take advantage of their pay per click research to help your own campaign. All the time that you might be spending on things like keyword research, split testing ad copy, and landing page design can now be used on other things. Why spend time doing all the work yourself, when the hard work has already been done for you?
There are numerous pay per click spying tools out there. Some are are the web, while others are software applications that you download and run from your own system. All of them work off the same essential idea. Ads that appear near the top of the search results over a number of days in a row are very likely to be making money for that advertiser. Who would be spending money for these top spots if they were losing money?
By taking advantage of an ad spying tool, you can automatically record and track what ads are being shown for specific keywords on a scheduled basis. After the tool has collected data for a long enough period of time (1-2 weeks), you should be able to easily determine which advertisers 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.
I’ve used several different ad spy tools myself, so let me describe to you what they have to offer.
iSpionage – This is the most costly 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 is also project based, so it is very easy to scan keywords from several niches at a time. In addition, it supports Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN Adcenter along with Google Adwords.
PPC Kahuna Software – This software is one of the main selling points 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. The advantage that PPC Kahuna offers are its [excellent|great|nice] filtering capabilities [that help you easily find what you need|which helps pinpoint those profitable competitors extremely fast]. It is also updated very often, so expect it to be more powerful in future releases.
Affiliate Espionage – This is a neat little tool that not many people know about. It is also very affordable with a one time payment of $9.97. Since it is a Firefox extension, it supports 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 (Adwords, Yahoo and MSN Adcenter) and it works by annotating the ads in your search results with useful data. The downside of this tool, is that all the information is not in one place, which makes it a little less convenient to find what you want than the previous two tools.
Traffic Travis – This is a great piece of software that any affiliate marketer should have. 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 Adwords however, and it is not quite as easy to use as iSpionage or PPC Kahuna if you are tracking several campaigns at once.
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