Using Ad Spy Tools to Help Your Pay-Per-Click Campaigns

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by: Mike Wong
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Date: Tue, 25 Aug 2009 Time: 8:38 AM
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Ad spying tools are essential tools for any pay per click marketer. They allow you to discover your competition and take advantage of all the research they have done and help your own pay per click campaign get off the ground. This allows you to save time and effort which can be applied to other things. Why waste time doing all the work yourself, when you don't have to?

There are countless ad spying tools out there. Some are are the web, while others are software applications that you start from your own system. All of them work off the same essential idea. Ads showing up near the top of the search results consistently are more than likely to be making money for that advertiser. Otherwise, why would they spend money advertising for these top spots if they were losing money?

By utilizing an ad spying tool, you can automatically record and track what ads are being shown for specific keywords on a daily basis. After collecting enough data (1-2 weeks), you should be able to easily 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 along with their landing page. As you can tell, this information can be very helpful for your own PPC campaign.

Lets take a look at some different Ad Spy Tools that I have used personally and see which one is the best.

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, it is web-based so it works on both Mac or PC. It is also project based, so it is very easy to scan keywords from several markets at a time. Plus, not only does it support Google Adwords, but it also can scan competitors on Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN Adcenter.

PPC Kahuna Software - This software is part of the PPC Kahuna pay per click training membership. It is a windows desktop software 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 [excellent|great|nice] filtering capabilities [that help you easily find what you need|which helps pinpoint those profitable competitors extremely fast]. The software gets updated quite often, so expect its capabilities to increase in the future.

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 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) 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 handy piece of software that any internet marketer should be using. It is a desktop application that you use on your own computer. 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 working with several campaigns at once.

About the Author

Study up before buying any ad spying program. For example, take a look at this iSpionage review and see how it stacks up to Traffic Travis. Everyone is different, so make sure you select the best ad spy tool for your needs.

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