It’s pretty tedious to bid on the broad, phrase, and exact match versions of your keywords.

An Adwords Wrapper Tool will give you a quick short-cut to create three versions of all your keywords. 

Once you’ve created your new keyword list, just run it through the Adwords Wrapper and create exact, phrase, and broad match versions of all your keywords in a second. Copy and paste them into the keywords of your Adgroup.

 

Try this free tool the Adwords Wraper. 

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To learn more of Jim’s PPC advertising techniques, check out PPC Domination.

Google provides a tool in their Adwords interface called the Google Website Optimizer. And it has a number of useful features that you won’t find in any other tracking software.

Split-testing pages works by taking two versions of your landing page that are exactly identical except for the one variable being tested. Be it a single word different in the headline, colour, or position of your optin box.

They then automatically forward clicks on your ad to one of the two versions of your page, alternating between them to fairly and accurately determine which results in the desired action of a sale or optin.

Whenever the clicker views a key action page, such as your “thank you” page after opting in, the download page for a piece of software you give out as a demo, or a thank you page after making a purchase, Google counts that as a successful conversion. 

A running record is kept of how many views each version of your test page received relative to the number of times your key “successful conversion” page was subsequently viewed. You can then look at two ratios you compare to decide which page results in the best rate of conversion.

 

Accurate Conversion Tracking

Tracking is rarely ever exactly accurate. The reason is that much of it is done with cookies to find out who the unique visitors or action takers are. Cookie tracking has its problems–for example, if a prospect uses a text browser or has their cookie security turned on high, you will not get any stats tracked for them.

All the same, most browsers store cookies and allow the tracking software to do their work.

Other third party tracking software does a good enough job. But they track all clicks–those you pay for and those you don’t. Google has procedures in place to cancel out forged clicks and other useless actions. Which makes the only clicks worth tracking those that Google produces. Since these are the only ones you actually pay for. That’s why I prefer to use Google’s website optimization tool.

 

Geek Talk: How to Define a Clear Winner

 

Statistics tells us that if you toss a good coin 100 times, it will land 50 times on heads and 50 times on tails. This is only theoretical, though, provided the coin is fairly weighted on both sides. In reality, you may observe 40 heads and 60 tails instead. But if you keep tossing the same coin, the you will get closer to the theoretical outcome of 50/50 heads/tails.

Few marketers split-test correctly because they act on too little data or otherwise they wait too long and waste opportunities to profit with their better landing page.

In the same way, if you toss the coin only 30 times, you are EXPECTED in theory to find it lands 15 times on heads and 15 times on tails. But in reality, the outcome could be extremely one-sided. And if you were to act on this data saying that the coin weighs more on one side than the other, you would probably be wrong.

Similarly, your two test-landing-pages may well show bias in favour of one versus the other even if they are the exact same page. Especially if measuring conversions with only data about a few clicks.

Running tests that update and track every click and conversion along with confidence statistics will help you determine if there is a large enough margin between the two test pages, relative to how many results were observed. Confidence statistics work by figuring out what the theoretical difference between your two landing page versions would be if it were due to the “randomness” phenomenom I described with the fair coin. If there is enough difference seen between the theoretical outcomes and the actual outcomes, you can safely conclude that the change being tested has an effect on how the page performs.

Rather than make these difficult calculations yourself the Google Website Optimizer will do it all for you and interpret the results on your behalf.

When Google says you have a winner, you can trust to kill the loser and keep the winner and repeat with another test variable.

 

I have used the Google Website Optimizer tool a lot in my business. I test the hell out of every landing page until I get a version that converts at the highest rate possible. This technique has been responsible for me seeing thousands upon thousands of Home Business leads at $2.35 each.

Start using the Google Website Optimizer today. It’s simple. Just create two versions of your best landing page and let the website optimizer tell you the winner!

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To learn more of Jim’s PPC advertising techniques, check out PPC Domination.

Do you know how to use FrontPage or write your own HTML webpages?

If your answer is no, then you’re not alone. A lot of marketers don’t move forward with their business because they don’t know any HTML. Although, I think that’s no excuse!

Here’s a really simple Landing Page Generator software i put together to help exactly people like yourself. In fact, even if you DO know how to make websites, you can still make use of this becuase it does them so quickly and easily. I build all my own landing pages with this free program. This way, every one of my PPC keywords can have its own landing pages with little effort.

Start Using the Free Landing Page Generator

 

A good PPC Lead Capture Page has the following components:

Headline: Get Attention Quickly

Headlines have the most influence on whether or not your page converts. Because if it doesn’t get attention immediately, people will leave soon after clicking without reading anything else. This will cost you more money per lead and increase your site’s bounce rate. Which has the nasty effect of lowering your quality score and giving you a big fat Google Slap.

That’s why, headlines are tested and re-tested by all marketers to find the best wording that gets maximum impact. An excellent tool to do your own tests is the Google Conversion Optimizer.

Marketers agree that sans-serif fonts like Tahoma and Arial give best results for headlines. And when the type is in red colour against a white background, it has a psychological effect of getting attention. You can even use red sparingly on your page to move people’s eyes down to important components on the page like the submit button for your optin box.

Do not obstruct view of your headline with a banner or space-filler graphics. That will kill your conversion rate because it takes attention away from the most important part of the page most responsible for conversion.

Keep your headline short and write your main benefit in the most attractive way possible.

 

Example:

• How I Made $250,000 My Sixth Month Marketing Online
• How To Make $10,000 Per Day From Your Home Business
• How I Made Google My Bitch & Forced It To Send Me 1,000 Qualified Home Business Leads Yesterday
• Imagine, 200 New Customers At Your Business Door Every Day

 

Sub Headline: Make an Offer or Bribe

Your subheadline or next bit of text directly after your headline should tell people the action they need to take in order to receive that benefit. Think of it like a secondary headline and it should offer an exchange of some kind that compels them to keep reading down the page. Before you start writing a landing page, decide what you will give people for free in exchange for their email address. A sales pitch or a bizop presentation will NOT do.

There must be a genuinely good reason and easily identifiable benefit they will received when they sacrifice their email address. After all, although you may not spam them, they do not know you and they worry that you will subject them to POTENTIAL unwanted email or high-pressure phone sales. Unless the benefit is so strong that the risk becomes negligible, they will not optin.

Write your subheadline carefully and think of it like a trade. Help them live beyond their next action and pose it in the present tense if you can.

Example:

• In the Next 3 Minutes, You Will Have In Your Hands the Keys to a Revolutionary Marketing System That Brings You Customers and Cash At Will
• 15 Minutes From Now, You Will Receive a Personal Phone Call From Me & Know Exactly What to Do This Year to Quit Your Job And Earn From Home Full Time

 

Short Bullets Packed With Benefits

The bullets or body of your landing page is designed to give prospects more reasons to take the next desired action of submitting their contact information. You can present it as bullets, a few short paragraphs of text, or a video.

You need to think of 3-5 reasons that matter to them why what you are about to share is important. Your company being in the ground floor is not a reason that matters to them. Nor does it matter who your founder is, that he is a scientist, or that your comp plan is the highest paying in the industry.

Instead, you should be telling them how these things affect them.

 

Example:

• Speak with an experienced entrepreneur who will take you through all the steps necessary to start profiting in your first week of Home Business ownership
   
• Have an ENDLESS supply of customers, putting money in your pocket daily by discovering a revolutionary product exclusive to our partners which cures obesity forever. (Remember that 60% of all Americans have this problem and want a quick and easy solution you can give them).
   
• Sell with confidence in your sleep by using our online marketing system which takes care of all marketing and advertising for you.
   

 

Clear Call to Action

Your optin box must be accompanied with a clear call to action. But that’s not all. You need to give prospects a real reason that makes sense for why you need their  phone or email address to share further information with them. Remember the squeeze page or lead capture page is a gateway to the rest of your content only accessible by a key piece of information they give you.

If you’re going to give them access to a private members area, you will need an email address to send them the password.

If it’s an e-mail based course, explain this and tell them that they must supply their email to receive the course.

If you are going to give a phone consultation, then, obviously you would need their phone number.

These are all good reasons to request contact information. As long as you are clear about it, people will be able to make the decision whether they want the next piece of information badly enough to reveal personal information to you.

Example:

• “Type your name and phone number below to receive a free 30 minute phone consultation and I’ll show you exactly how to advertise your Home Business online.”
• “Enter your email address below to receive full access to our members-only area.”
• “Tell me in the box below your best email where I can send you the 11-day E-Mail-only course for Free.”
• “Type your E-Mail below to be notified whenever new posts like this are added to the blog”

 

How to Use the Landing Page Generator Correctly

Once you’ve figured all of this out, you’re ready to go.

1. Fill out the form on the PPC Landing Page Generator. Sign up for an autoresponder account at iContact. Not only do I recommend their autoresponder highly, it is the only one the Landing Page Generator works with. Produce an optin box using the iContact form generator wizard and copy the code into the autoresponder box of the Landing Page Generator.
     
2. Use for your Thank You page URL the link to your funded proposal sales letter, your bizop sales page, or to the information you promised to give them.
    
3. Submit the Landing Page Designer form and a new HTML page will be automatically saved to your desktop. You can either customise this further in Frontpage or use it as is.
    
4. Sign up for a hosting account with godaddy.com or hostgator.com
    
5. Use your host’s FTP interface to upload the landing page file to your website
     

Go try the landing page generator and write for me below in the comments section if you need any further help using it.

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To learn more of Jim’s PPC advertising techniques, check out PPC Domination.

According to Google, 10-20% of all searches start out MIS-SPELLED.

Capturing those searches by bidding on them with Pay-Per-Click is one of the smartest ways to easily and cheaply capture prospects. It gives you the advantage of positioning your Adwords ad in front of potential prospects–before they see any of your competitors’ ads. But few people know the proper use of Typo Generator tools.

I’ll tell you my method in a second. Check this out…

There is insane competition for popular home business keywords in Pay-Per-Click. And yet, there is virtually no competition when the same keyword is misspelled.

Why not?

Advertisers rarely test all mis-spelling variations of each keyword, or they think that their search volume isn’t worth the time to investigate.

For a moment, I’d like you to imagine this: You have 10 mis-spellings of 5 very popular keywords, each getting an average of just 20 searches a day when misspelled–that would make you a cool 1,000 daily impressions. 

Better still, consider that since the competition is significantly less, you’d have two new advantages versus bidding on one correctly-spelled and very popular keyword:

1. Cheaper average CPC (less dollars per click)
2. and More conversions (less clicks per lead)

To understand why bidding on less popular mis-spelled keywords gets you more conversions, let’s get into the shoes of your prospect for a minute.

First of all, they’re in a rush and due to keyboard slips, accidents, and just straight-up ignorance they type their search with a mistake. Google and other searches try to help the searcher by making suggestions for the correct spelling, but they still return results anyway.

Suppose you were your prospect. You search for “home bizness leads” instead of “home business leads”. There’s a single sponsored ad on the right and few search results. Google tells you that you might have made a mistake. Do you a) re-run the search with the correct spelling immediately or b) glance above the fold of results to see if there’s something that matches what you’re looking for?

Alright, let’s suppose you either didn’t like what Googled returned for the wrongly spelled search of “home bizness leads” or you decided to fix your mistake and search again. Either way, you are now looking at results for “home business leads”. There are 70 million of them and there are thousands of ads.

Your attention is split between everything on that page, because everything “sorta” matches.

On the other hand, with your first search, with spelling mistake, the only ad you could see was the one ad above the fold. If it matched what you wanted, you would have clicked it rendering all ads and all 70 million listing results for the correct spelling USELESS. Because the subsequent search for the correct spelling would never have happened.

Here’s another reason to bid on mis-spellings and typos. Using the Google Keyword Tool, let’s compare competition stats for both versions of the keyword:

 

home business leads

Suggested CPC Bid for positions 1-3: $13.03

 

home bizness leads

Suggested CPC Bid for position 1-3: $0.05

 

I’m sure you don’t want to spend $13.03 for a click. But suppose you got greedy when you saw that the keyword “home business leads” receives a maximum of 13,000 monthly impressions (about 433 searches a day). Perhaps you bid, i dunno, $10 CPC to scrape the bottom of the first page of results–maybe get seen by a few people. Or perhaps you are a little careful with your bid, so you decide the second page is good enough for you and bid $5 CPC.

Besides the high CPC bid, now your ad is buried in a sea of “relevant” ads. The prospect has choice and instead of just clicking your ad because for its relevance, they’ll compare it and the page it goes to with every other contestant. Your click-thru-rate suffers. Your cost increases. Your conversion rate is reduced. Your quality score drops. Your ad rank drops. Your cost increases some more.

I paint a bleak picture. With competitive keywords, the ACTUAL traffic you get is never equal to the potential traffic available.

The alternative is to bid on the mis-spelled “home bizness leads” for 5 cents and hold the #1 spot above the fold. Whoever searches on this version will have little choice. They are more likely to click your ad merely because it is the only relevant one they can see. They are also more likely to optin because they don’t have anything to press back to. You’ll enjoy a high CTR. An phenomenal opt-in rate. Which result in lower cost per click, lower cost per lead, and high quality score.

This way, you’re in a better position to capture a majority of the potential traffic available. Four more misspellings, will easily get you 1,000 valuable daily impressions instead of the 433 available for the correct spelling.

So now that I’ve presented a small case for adding misspelled versions of popular keywords in your PPC campaign, let’s talk about how to implement this correctly:

 

1. Use a mis-spell or typo generator to get as many variations on your main keyword as possible
     
2. Import your keywords with correctly spelled ads into a Yahoo SEM account
     
3. Bid 10 cents per click
     
4. Run your ads for a full week before making any changes
     
5. Sort your keywords by highest-to-lowest impressions
     
6. Take the top 5 spellings of each seed keyword into your Google Adwords account and tweak them for maximum profit

 

Easy? Go try it with this Typo Generator now and let me know how it works for you by typing in the comments section below…

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To learn more of Jim’s PPC advertising techniques, check out PPC Domination.

When searching for keywords with high search volume and low competition, there is no denying that a keyword combiner is an excellent way to go.

Keyword combiners, generators, or mixers work by taking 2 or more lists of keywords and then permutate them into new keyword combinations. These combinations are usually not thought of by your PPC competitors who usually just use keyword research tools with a seed keyword they supply. Obviously, there’s two problems with their method:

1. It doesn’t capture all the infinite versions that the same search may be conducted by searchers. Keyword tools only show the keywrods with highest search volume–which everyone wants. But the issue is that they are just longer-tail versions of the same seed keyword that you input. There’s few new ideas there.
    
2. Since everyone else is using the same keyword databases and tools, every advertiser is competing for the same scraps of the market. Which makes your required CPC bid too high to be profitable.

 

Keyword Mixers help you come up with tens of thousands of combinations competitors aren’t bidding on. The only issue is filtering out the keywords that get no search. I’ll show you a simple way to do that below.

Here’s how Keyword Mixers work:

Suppose you sell nutritional supplements online, and you want to bid different ways people might search for nutrition to buy. You might use the following two lists:

 

List 1:

• nutrition
• nutritional
• vitamin
• mineral
• antioxidant

 

List 2:

• supplement
• pill
• tablet
• gel
• capsule
• drink
• juice

 

Keyword generators will make the following combinations for you:

nutrition supplement, nutrition pill, nutrition tablet, nutrition gel, nutrition capsule, nutrition drink, nutrition juice, nutritional supplement, nutritional pill, nutritional tablet, nutritional gel, nutritional capsule, nutritional drink, nutritional juice, vitamin supplement, vitamin pill, vitamin tablet, vitamin gel, vitamin capsule, vitamin drink, vitamin juice, antioxidant supplement, antioxidant pill, antioxidant tablet, antioxidant gel, antioxidant capsule, antioxdant drink, antioxidant juice

 

Many of these tools will also give you plural versions of the keywords and combinations without the space to help you capture even more searches. In any case, however you use your choice of Keyword Generator, you’ll be able to produce large volumes of keywords very quickly.

 

How to Filter Keywords From Keyword Mixer

I usually import all the keyword list into my Yahoo SEM account without filtering. Since Yahoo is not as strict as Google on quality, I use it like a sandbox to play in until I know what is worth keeping.

I bid on the new keywords with small CPC bids of 10 cents or so.

After some stats have accumulated, I just sort by the impression column. This sends to the bottom of the Yahoo SEM interface all keywords that have too much competition. Since your bid is low, competitive keywords will simply receive NO impressions.

Better still, this technique brings to the top only keywords that actually get high search–and impressions with the 10 cent bid. These have LEAST competition and maximum potential.

So I take them into my Google Adwords account and tweak to maximise profit.

If you’d like to try this technique, here’s a free Keyword Mixer tool I recommend: http://www.keywordmixer.com/

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To learn more of Jim’s PPC advertising techniques, check out PPC Domination.

I got a pretty cool email yesterday.

I’m actually in a cafe called Lemon right now in Abdoun with some friends but I wanted to whip out this really quick post. The email was a link to a video about how to troubleshoot your Adwords account and diagnose quality score problems long before your quality score value changes. It’s part of a paid PPC newsletter I subscribe to, so I can’t share that video with you. But I want to tell you about a tool they suggested called KWBrowse that gives new keyword suggestions.

This tool is different from many others I use in that it gives new LATERAL keyword suggestions.

Most keyword tools will ask you for an input keyword as a seed from which to derive other suggestions. This is good when you want to go deep in your campaigns and get longer-tail suggestions.  However, KWBrowse gives you a graphical representation of keyword groups that help you go WIDE in your campaigns. You can take their suggestions and plug them into the Google Keyword Tool.

Check it out at http://www.kwbrowse.com/

Try it and let me know what you think!

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To learn more of Jim’s PPC advertising techniques, check out PPC Domination.

Let’s get something straight right from the get-go.

I’m not a fan of Spy Tools, so if you’re looking for someone to tell you that you should use them, then I’m not the guy. I see PPC Spy Tools as a glorified gimmick that sounds good in theory but rarely ever delivers in reality.

It’s just one of those cheeky tricks marketers employ to take the cash of the lazy marketer on a monthly basis. It appeals to people who think that they’re going to cheat and take someone else’s hard work for themselves. I have issues with the creators of these tools from a moral stand-point too. They are promoting that we dirty the Ad space with bullshit copies of ads going to copies of other people’s landing pages. Google has to constantly slap even the legitimate advertisers just to clean up the mess of these people.

Recently, I decided to do some research of my own to find out what it is exactly that Spy tools do to appear like they are giving you the secrets of the top dogs in your pay-per-click market.

I picked up as an example, the SpyFu tool popularly known for many years. There are other examples though, and they operate in a very similar way. Examples include, Keyword Spy, PPC Web Spy, and Google Cash Detective.

Right away, I saw their method involves running a “bot” or a computer program that sits around the net all day running fake searches for different keywords.

Now, you might not be advertising yet on the keyword you want to spy on, but your active ads are still being triggered by these bot-searches. Imagine with all of these different bots from the different Spy Tools all running searches on your keywords and racking up impressions on your ads. Now, let’s assume that they never actually initiate a “click” action on your ads so it won’t cost you any money that way.

However, the act of “searching” racks up impressions on your ads. Impressions that don’t result in clicks…which translates to reduced Click-Thru-Rate. Consider, that Google and other search engines penalise such ads that are displayed often without clicks. Ad position goes down, click cost goes up, and quality score (which is 80% influenced by click-thru-rate) is reduced. Can we say, that this will eventually result in Google Slap for even legitimate advertisers?

Also, when you go to your favourite keyword research tool and look up the popularity of keywords you want to bid on–you’re going to see impressions heavily weighted by these spy tools. Rendering keyword research tools almost useless. Which means you’re likely to choose keywords that APPEAR popular to bid on when really hundreds of searches a day are actually initiated by these Spy Tools in their research phase. Or as they like to call it their “web scrapping” or “crawling” of the internet ad space.

The tools then store this data and keep updating it daily in a database. Which they query when you come to “spy” on someone else’s display domain.

Let’s assume that none of this bothers you. And talk accuracy of the information Spy Tools give you:

Next in my research, I went to the SpyFu documentation and read what they say about how they calculate Daily Ad Budget. This is one of the factors that customers of these spy programs find important. If an advertiser has a large daily ad spend, they’re immediate candidates for Big Boy status. These are the people you’re going to copy, right?

Here’s what SpyFu says about Daily Ad Budget:

When we calculate Daily Ad Budget, we start with all the keywords that we have seen a domain advertise on. We eliminate overlapping keywords. For example, “race cars”, “luxury cars”, and “cars” becomes “cars”. Then, we take into account the current and historical positions that we have seen the domain’s ad appear for each given keyword. Based on the position of each ad, we estimate the price that the domain likely pays for the keyword. Basically, we then add up all the custom individual keyword costs per day and we arrive at the Daily Ad Budget.

Basically what this translates to, is that they are calculating the CPC bid of individual keywords by looking at what position each ad shows up in for a searched keyword. If the position is high and the position is equally high, it would SEEM that the advertiser pays more per click. However, this doesn’t factor their quality score, their account history, or the click-thru-rate of the ad. Which will all influence the position and cost-per-click bid.

Guessing the Broad Match Algorithm

In addition, finding “overlapping” keywords can only be done as a best-guess. No one really knows the algorithm Google uses for broad match keywords. We also know for a fact that both Google and Yahoo decide to show ads especially in broad (or advanced) match based on the PREVIOUS search the user conducts. Which the Spy Tool has no idea of. So Spy Tools will never get you a completely accurate list of the actual keywords people bid on.

Ignoring Long-Tail

Next, you’ll notice that in all Spy tools, you only ever see at most keyphrases of 3 words or less. The reason is that their overlap-finding-algorithm is too restrictive and their data is only useful for high volume keywords. They, instead, lump all longer-tail keywords into a single general term. This means you’ll never get a full picture of what is going on in anyone’s account. For all you know, their money keywords come from 1000’s of low-search long-tail keywords. And you’ll be baffled why the more general term SpyFu gave you stats about doesn’t work.

Flawed Average CPC

Here’s what SpyFu says in their docs about how they calculate average CPC:

If you take the Average Cost per Click of every keyword that a domain advertises on, add them all up, and divide by the total number of keywords, you will have the Avg Cost/Click for a domain. For example, if a domain advertises on 3 keywords with Avg Cost/Clicks of $1, $2, and $3, respectively then the Avg Cost per Click for the domain would be $2.

What a load of crap. This would only work if there are exactly the same number of clicks for all keywords. And we know for a fact that even if you BID the same on your keywords, your click count that Google or Yahoo report is different for each keyword, each Ad Group, and each campaign.

Here’s a table to show SpyFu’s example:

	Key Term 1	Key Term 2	Key Term 3	Totals
Avg CPC	1	2	3
Number of Clicks	1	1	1	3 clicks
Total Cost	$1	$2	$3	$6

Looks right. Doesn’t it? Now look at the table with the same numbers they get and we only change the number of clicks received for each key term:

	Term 1	Term 2	Term 3	Totals
Avg CPC	1	2	3
Number of Clicks	11	13	20	44 clicks
Total Cost	22	26	60	$108

In this case the average CPC is $108/44 click =Average CPC of $2.45 not $2 as SpyFu’s method would suggest.

What About Region Targeting?

Unless Spy Tools have an international presence (which I’m sure they don’t), they gather all their stats about the web from the locations they are centrally located at. Meaning, if an advertiser gets most of their leads from Australia while the Spy Tool operates out of Arizona, USA it will not be able to tell you that the advertiser is winning a lot of money with their keyword in Australia.

There are many more reasons why Keyword Spy Tools do not give you any kind of accurate results you can use. I think these are sufficient to build a case though, against using them. And for $70 a month, SpyFu’s subscription is NOT cheap. I would rather keep that $70 to get 35 more leads a month! I would rather use that ad budget to actually TEST my own ads and keywords and find out what works best for my business. So should you.

The fact of the matter, though, is that Keyword Spy tools exist and they’re not going away. And despite all my moral issues with them, I occasionally use them to get fresh keyword ideas when I have none. I do not trust any stats given about those keywords or copy the ads I see.

A good PPC advertiser knows that a lot more goes into creating profitable campaigns than just knowing who’s ad shows up the longest and who spends most. The way you group your keywords together is a much more important piece of information to know. And if someone could tell me that, maybe then I’ll pay the subscription willingly. We know that negative keywords play a huge role in the success of a campaign–the keywords that someone’s ad DOESN’T show up for–can someone tell me that? Probably not.

And next time you whip out a Spy Tool, just think–if you had spent $100,000+ dollars to find out what keywords and ads make you money–do you want some nobody advertiser to come along and take your leads over night? I think not.

Much of the material in this post came from this well-thought-out blog post on how to FOOL your competitors who think they’re smart using Spy Tools: http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2008/09/4-ways-fool-your-competitors-using-spyfu.html

Stay original!

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To learn more of Jim’s PPC advertising techniques, check out PPC Domination.

I’ve had more than a few questions about keyword research tools that claim to help you “spy” on your competition. (Don’t get too excited & click just yet) Examples are Spyfu, Keyword Spy, and most recently, PPC Web Spy.

The tools are supposed to be able to allow you to plug in the address of your competitions’ websites to retrieve all the keywords they’re bidding on in sponsored search. Also included, is usually a copy of the corresponding ads and estimated bids. Sounds pretty useful doesn’t it?

Not really.

I’m gonna tell you NOT to research like this. There are better ways to spend your money (like on your PPC ads). And more effective ways to beat competitors to the top of the search page.

Am I saying this because it’s immoral to spy and steal the campaigns of others? No.

It’s because Spy tools don’t deliver on their claims.

To non-technical folks, computer programmers are like magicians. They create magic with their computer code and do amazing nearly miraculous things. But another programmer looking in from the outside can still see the thin string that pulls cards into the magician’s sleeve. They can see that the magic is nothing but an illusion.

Spy tools are an illusion. A marketing gimmick. There is a market for them because people are lazy. I mean, sure it would be nice to just find a successful affiliate promoting the same offer as us and then steal their campaign for ourselves…right?

Except that Spy tools generally return untargeted keywords that no one in their right mind is bidding on. Their bid estimates are WAY off. And they don’t tell you the REAL secrets of why someone else’s ads are working.

For example, they won’t tell you:

• How the advertiser organises his/her account.
• Or the negative keywords they include in their keyword lists.
• Or the way they group their keywords.
• Or the way they monetize their clicks.

That’s the real stuff worth paying for. And I’m pretty sure if a tool could tell you all of that, it would cost a lot more than $96 a month.

I buy and test just about every PPC tool you’ve ever come across.

Spy tools work by “guessing” keywords, monitoring which ads show up, and then adding them into a database they do lookups on when you use the tool’s search.

They definitely don’t have a way to go into people’s accounts and steal their keywords. There are keywords left out, quite often the money keywords! Also, there are many keywords returned by the spy tool that don’t actually trigger those ads. The bid estimates are wayyyy off. The click estimates are always wrong.

It’s a big collection of unrelated information, gathered from god knows where, and combined in a way to look authoritative. All of it designed to trick you into believing you’ve seen into the inner workings of your competitors’ ad campaigns. When all you’ve done is fallen for an illusion.

Read the small print on keyword spy tools, you’ll find they have disclaimers reflecting their anticipated unreliability.

The only real way to beat up your competition and take their spot in the sponsored results, is to monitor them over time, identify the winners, learn from them, and then do it better.

If you insist on spending your money on a Keyword Spy tool, then save your dollars for this next one:

I am at the moment in the process of testing a tool called PPC Bully. This is different because it’s not framed as a “spy” tool–it simply automates studying the competition before you start spending your own money bidding on an expensive keyword.

A couple of years ago, I got bored of manually checking the competition by hand. So I wrote a very simple program to make my job easier:

The way it worked was, I’d give it a bunch of keywords I was considering bidding on. And at a defined interval throughout the day, this little program would go out and simulate searches on all those keywords. It would then retrieve all the sponsored ads that are returned and log them for me to study later.

Here’s the theory:

An advertiser who is losing money with their ad+keyword+landing page combination is going to do one of two things:

• They’re gonna be savvy enough to take their ad down, modify it, and try a new combination
• Or, they’re gonna leave it till Google slides it down in position and probably slaps it to hell so it won’t show up in sponsored ads any more

Either way, the end result, is that over time, the ads that don’t work stop showing.

On the other hand, if you’re looking for advertisers that are probably making money, all you need to do is find the ad+keyword+landing page combinations that show up EVERY time the program simulates the search for those keywords over an extended period of time. That could be a day, a week, or even a month depending on how competitive the keyword is.

PPC Bully tests your competitors like this.

It isn’t my program. Some bright marketers hired programmers and turned the idea into a commercial service.

Now, if you’re thinking about bidding on some expensive keywords, it’s easy to avoid risking your own money. Just run PPC Bully with that keyword and monitor the competition for a week or so. Find the winning combination of keyword+ad+landing page, and then try to do something similar without violating copyrights.

All I know is that out of all the spy tools I’ve seen so far, the $49 investment in PPC Bully is the only one worth exploring.

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To learn more of Jim’s PPC advertising techniques, check out PPC Domination.