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Using Ad Spy Tools to Help Your PPC Campaigns

by Mike Wong

Ad spying tools are incredibly useful tools for anyone who advertises on the search engines. They allow you to discover your successful competitors and take advantage of all the research they have done and help your own pay per click campaign get off the ground. 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 you don't have to?

There are countless ad spying tools out there. Some are web based, while others are software applications that you download and run from your own system. All of them work off the same essential idea. Ads showing up at the top of the search results consistently are very likely to be profitable for that advertiser. Who would be spending money for these top spots if they were losing money?

By utilizing an ad spying tool, you can automatically keep track of what ads are being shown for your keywords on a scheduled basis. After the tool has collected data for a long enough period of time (10-14 days), you should be able to easily figure out which competitors are doing the best and for which keywords. From there, you can examine their ad copy as well as their landing page. As you can see, this information can be very helpful for your own PPC campaign.

Lets take a look at several 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, 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 multiple markets at a time. In addition, it supports Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN Adcenter along with Google Adwords.

PPC Kahuna - 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 quite powerful. 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 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) 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 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 internet marketer should be using. It is a desktop software that you use on your own computer. What makes it great, is that it is completely free! The PPC Analysis module of Traffic Travis is actually a very effective ad spy tool. I would recommend that you try it first as new pay per click marketer. It is limited to Adwords 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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