How to Spy on Your Competitors’ PPC Campaigns for Free

A great tool to spy on your Pay Per Click (PPC) competitors is KeywordSpy. This tool has a massive database of keywords and ads which is constantly updated and expanded. Here’s how you can get this valuable data and use it for your own campaigns.



Getting Started

To start using KeywordSpy you don’t even need an account, but having one is better because you get access to features such as exporting ads formatted for importing in PPC search engines like Google and Bing. To get a free trial account, just go to keywordspy.com and click the Free Trial link. Complete the sign-up process, and once you are logged in your account, you can start spying on ads. You can do this by searching the various components of a PPC ad: Domains, Keywords, Destination URLs, and Ad Copies. You also need to select your market, for example you could do a search for the US market, or the UK, among other countries. This is important because each market is different, composed of different competitors and different products.



Spying on keywords

The easiest way to start is to spy for keywords. For example you can type in "weight loss" and immediately find out what the top sites are. From there you can click on a site and see which keywords it has been bidding on. You can even see the actual PPC ads they’ve been using, and Cost Per Click (CPC) for both keywords and ads, which gives you an estimate on how expensive it will be to enter a particular market.



Profiting from your competitors

KeywordSpy also allows you to sort keywords and ads by ROI, which is a simple measure of how many times a keyword or ad has been seen since the first time KeywordSpy detected it, to the last time it was seen. Obviously the more a keyword or ad is displayed, the higher the probability it’s a winner, because no one would reasonably let a keyword or ad run for much time if it’s not making money.



As a free member to KeywordSpy you have a limit to the amount of keywords and ads you can see, but this is still a great way to get more insight into your market, allowing you to profit from your competitors spending on PPC ads. You just go there and copy the best ads and keywords, which gives you huge advantage in starting PPC campaigns, specially if you don’t have much experience or money to spend on testing.



This is just an introduction to the art of spying your PPC competitors, and here’s a final piece of internet marketing advice: don’t copy the ads, but extract the main ideas and make your own ads. This way you learn to think in terms of your customer, and who knows, you might get your ads to perform even better than the ones you’ve been spying on.