If you have been following this blog, you probably know how strongly I feel about the merits of SpyFu. SpyFu is a great competitive intelligence tool that gives you a lot of ammunition to chip away at your competitors’ strengths in your niche.

If you have used SpyFu before, you are probably familiar with the above search box. It is your portal to finding what’s working and what’s not for your rivals. But until now, SpyFu allowed you to figure out what your competitors were doing and try to figure out what you were not doing. SpyFu Kombat takes it to the next level by allowing you to figure out what you have in common with your competitors, and what they are doing differently from you. Take a look at the below diagram:

It just goes on to prove my assumption that John McCain is doing a better job in the paid search channel. John Mccain ads show up for almost anything you can search for. But the Obama campaign has done a magnificent job with their organic campaign. They have obviously been helped with bloggers and publishers linking to Obama’s web properties.

But that’s not all. You can also compare these figures on a graph to figure out any historical trends.

You can get down and dirty with these diagrams and figure out what keywords your competitors are using. Now, I don’t compete with SpyFu with my coupon site, but it’s interesting to see what I could have in common with SpyFu.com.

It turns out that I have nothing in common with SpyFu (too bad!). But that doesn’t mean I am hopeless. If I wanted to change my coupon site to compete with SpyFu, I would obviously need a similar or better service. But also, I can use the keywords that SpyFu Kombat brings to light to create content pages to compete with SpyFu. This is just an example and not a very good one. But you get the point. If you know what keywords your competitors are showing up for, it’s easier to customize your pages and create new content to target keywords that your sites are not optimized for.

SpyFu is now charging $50 for this super bad @$$ service. But you get more than SpyFu Kombat. You also get the standard SpyFu service. I personally do recommend signing up for the annual subscription as it helps you save money and protect yourself against any increase in fees. But my experience with SpyFu folks has been great. These guys are in it not for the money but to provide value to us marketers. If you compare SpyFu with any of their competitors, there is no question that SpyFu provides the best bang for the buck by a big margin.

Who Shouldn’t get SpyFu Kombat:

SpyFu Kombat is not for everyone. If you are lazy to get down and dirty with your SEO and paid campaigns, SpyFu Kombat is not for you. If you have money to burn, you are more than welcome to spend it on SpyFu. SpyFu is for serious marketers (emphasis on serious). You don’t have to be a guru to take advantage of SpyFu & Kombat, but you need to have the spirit and the backbone to get down and do some great things. The sky is the limit with SpyFu, but like a powerful machine gun, if you don’t use it, it’s not worth the money. But if you are ready to challenge your competitors head on and make some cash in the process, SpyFu should definitely be a part of your arsenal.

Is economy getting to you? Are you obsessed with the politics these days? Well, here is what you should really be obsessed about: SpyFu Kombat! I don’t know if you guys followed my conversation with SpyFu’s Sidra, but she was kind enough to let me know about SpyFu Kombat’s release. I’ve got to say, I am very impressed by it. Now, I am not going to ruin the surprise and am right now writing a more detailed review of SpyFu Kombat for tomorrow. But here is what you should do: Subscribe! I don’t know much about SpyFu’s plans for SpyFu Kombat but I’ll get it as long as it’s affordable.

P.S. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s coverage of SpyFU Kombat!

If you have worked for a big corporation before, you have probably heard this statement before: “we’ll just throw some money at it.” That’s really what most big corporations do with their advertising campaigns. They optimize for a while but then start throwing money at their campaigns. They overspend with their campaigns, consultants, conferences, and training classes. They keep throwing money at the problem until they get satisfactory results.

The big guys can afford to do that. They have money to burn, and how they use it is their decision. But it’s stunning that some small businesses follow the same path. They stretch themselves by spending more than they can afford on advertising. They keep investing in the latest and greatest PPC tools. Take Hitwise for example. Hitwise is a great competitive intelligence tool but it costs a ton. I doubt any early stage small business can afford those guys. But surprisingly, the more I talk to small business owners, the more I hear about them thinking about going with Hitwise to gain competitive edge! Hitwise is a great tool but it can’t run your business for you neither can it do magic. Running a business comes with uncertainties and can be stressful for most folks. But here is the thing. Hitwise may give you confidence for a month or two, but once you start stretching yourself and don’t see the results, you are going to end up in a worst place.

I personally believe that Guerrilla marketing is the best way to go for small businesses. Large businesses are less agile to compete with small business in the Guerrilla marketing department. If you are a small business owner, you are way better off spending your money on Guerrilla tactics than fancy tools or wasteful advertising habits.

I have said it before and stand by it yet again. Google and its tools are probably the only tools that you will need to get started with an effective PPC campaign. Google Adwords keyword tool is so powerful that paid keyword subscription services can be in trouble unless they start innovating and offering features that are remarkably better than the ones offered by Google. What folks don’t understand is that Google loves us all. Google wants us all to throw our money to get traffic to our sites. That’s a big part of its business. That’s why Google offers these free tools.

But Google search can give you so much information about your niche, it’s not even funny. One of the fastest ways to get started in any niche is by looking at what others are doing. So let’s say you want to promote an offer using Google Adwords. The best way to do is by searching for a core keyword in that niche on Google. By looking at people who are advertising in your niche, you can find out a lot about the niche. For instance, if there are 4 pages of advertisers for your niche, then you can tell the market is a red ocean. By monitoring the ads on the first page for a week or a month, you can figure out who’s actually making money on Google. There are very subtle things, but at the same time are as powerful as any information you can get from paid tools.

So here is my recommendation for folks who are getting started with pay per click marketing: know you Google basics. It’s free, and there are plenty of online resources to learn from. And don’t forget to subscribe to Inside Adwords.

I have a confession to make. I have never been good in naming anything in my life. Whether it is naming files or naming sites, I have just been terrible at it. That trait followed me to the Internet marketing world and to my PPC campaigns. When you start your first pay per click marketing campaign, you don’t have to worry about what you name your campaign (or so I thought), but it is very easy to get in trouble when you keep expanding your campaigns every day.

Google allows you to have a total of 2500 ad-groups in your campaign. Now you can do it the wrong way, like I did at first, and reuse your paused campaigns to promote totally different products (without renaming the campaign) or you can come up with a good naming convention for your Adwords account. Using Adwords default naming convention is not recommended. By default Adwords name your campaigns “Campaign #N.” You are obviously allowed to change the name of the campaign at the very beginning of campaign creation process. I used to click on the next button fast until I got to the more important part of the process. That meant that my campaign structure was something like the following:

Campaign #1 – Adgroup #1,#2, #3

Campaign #2 – Adgroup #1, #2, #3

What you want to do is to clearly define what each campaign is about. For instance, if you are selling “ebook x”, and you are bidding on the URL (e.g. ebookx.com, ebookx.net, ebook-x.com), you could name the campaign “ebookx – URL.” This name tells me that the campaign is about ebookx and you are bidding on URLs in that campaign. You could also create a campaign for branded terms and put your URLs in an ad-group called “ebookx-branded-URL.” Isn’t that easier to understand?

You can get as complicated as you want with your naming convention, but at the end of the day as long as you have a campaign naming convention that allows you to figure out what the campaign is about without having to open it up, you are all set. I wonder how many folks have made the same mistake that I explained above.

If you have been involved with Google Adwords for a while, you have probably heard of Google’s Adwords certification. Google has come up with this certification program for folks who want to prove to their customers and employers that they are qualified and they know what they are talking about.

The exam is not that challenging. It is 100+ questions about the ins and outs of Adwords. So if you are hoping to pass the exam without knowing the details, you may be wasting your time. But the funny thing is the videos and text training provided by Adwords covers most of the questions on the exam. What I found challenging about the exam were errors in questions. For instance, there were a couple of questions that were asking me to look at a graph but there was no link to the graph anywhere on the page. But if you score 75%, you pass the exam, and that is certainly not hard to do. Which brings me to the next point:

Just like any exam, you can study and cram for Google Adwords exam and pass it in the first try. The exam is open book and cheap, so you can take it a couple of times if you don’t pass it in your first try. Passing the exam does not mean that you are a master in Adwords. It just shows that you know your way around Adwords.

Google Certification is great for folks who are very experienced in the PPC field, but do not expect for a second that it can help you actually become a better marketer. The certification tests you on Adwords details, but it doesn’t test you on your marketing abilities. You may be able to get a job with the certification in your hands, but if you are not a good marketer, it will show eventually. So should you trust a Google certified professional? Not really! I trust the track-record and experience of marketers that work for me not the awards and certifications that they have.

This is one of the biggest issue for pay per click marketers. Let’s say you are planning to promote a product on Google adwords. Should you direct your traffic to a landing page or should you direct traffic to where it all happens?

It’s true that not many people agree on one or the other approach being better. That’s why we have sophisticated testing solutions out there on the market. If we knew the answer to this question already, then why are we wasting time grappling with it. The truth is, depending on your market, your conversion is going to be better with one of the above approach. Having been an affiliate in the credit card industry, I can tell you that I have seen both approaches work. We all know that Google cash is pretty much dead. In essence, you can’t direct traffic directly to the merchant’s side (actually there is a way around it ) But if you are an advertiser with a product, you have a decision to make. You can use your landing page to convince people to take that extra step or you can rely on your ads to do the job for you. But a lot of it depends on your product.

One thing that you should do is test the two approaches to figure out what works the best for you. I personally like the landing page approach better as I get to sell other products or collect information on my landing pages. But then again, I don’t use the same approach for different products. So when in doubt, let the numbers speak.

You may have heard this idea before, but a few good marketers believe that you shouldn’t trust EPC and your short-term profit when it comes to advertising online on Google and other search engines. The concept of customer Life-Time-Value (cLTV) does make sense on the paper. After all, taking into account the total income that you get from a customer during the life of relationship should matter.

But most PPC marketers focus on short-term profits than long-term. Here is why:

• LTV is hard to calculate: you may be able to forecast a LTV value for each of your customers, but there are a lot of uncertainties involved in the process. Unless you have been in the business for a long-time, you are not going to have enough data to conclude who is more profitable than whom.
• cLTV is dangerous: I am an optimistic person, always trying to see the positive in every situation. But LTV is a dangerous metric to play with. You can get ahead of yourself and expect “X” amount of profit from a customer just to have the conditions change drastically against your business. In other words, it’s easy to overshoot by going with LTV. A lot of companies have gone bankrupt because of solely relying on this metric. Now, what LTV is good for if you are out of business?
• cLTV can lead to expensive decisions: let’s say a company such as Capital One can spend $50 per click for the word “credit card.” They simply know that every conversion is going to cost them $500 on average but since their average cLTV is $1000, they are making a profit. But a small business can go in the red by using the same analogy. You need to have a strong cash flow to be able to play the cLTV game.

My goal with my campaigns has always been to get the customers for the lowest CPA possible. That’s why I am not a strong believer in cLTV. Why would you want to throw cash at a problem that can be solved in other ways? cLTV may work if you hit a wall with your advertising campaigns, but for most of us, it provides no significant value.

Have you wondered how to get around the restrictions of your affiliate program to include branded terms in your ads? Let’s say you want to promote company Y on Adwords. In order to get a better quality score and CTR, it is better to use the brand terms in your ads. In fact, Google will remove your ads if you use the word “Y” in your ads. That’s when you should get a little bit create. By adding “@” to the beginning of the brand term, you can make it past Google filters. It’s not easy, and there is a chance that you will get caught, but I have seen too many instances of this practice to start doubting it now. But I am sure the practice will be stopped soon, so you should take advantage of it now if you can.

If you ask 10 different pay per click marketers about what metrics they use to measure success, you are going to get 10 slightly different answers. So here is my question for you guys. What key performance indicators do you use to measure success for your campaigns? Is it ROI, EPC, CTR, or CPA? Please share your thoughts.