PPC Shadow is the newest Adwords spying tool that has been released to help affiliate and pay per click marketers simplify the process of managing their CPAs. The concept behind the tool is very simple yet powerful at the same time. If you have been in the Adwords game, you know that most successful pay per click marketers track everything. They track ads, keywords, URLs, and everything else you can think of. If you want to lower your costs and achieve higher quality scores, you better have ads that not only get a high CTR but also bring you money. Would you spend money on Adwords if you are losing money?

That’s the philosophy behind PPC Shadow. It is an Adwords tracking system that allows you to figure out what you competitors are doing and how long they are running their ads for a specific keyword. That’s probably one of the best way to figure out who’s making money from what.

There are many ways to make money using Adwords, but spying on others is probably the easiest one. You don’t have to work that hard, and you let others test offers for you before you jump in and grab a piece of the profits. That’s exactly why an automated tool such as PPC Shadow comes in handy. The only downside to this tool is that it is only available to a limited number of folks (I guess the server load is too much to handle after a certain point). Let’s hope they make this available to all of us in the future.

Recently, I had a chance to play with the free version of PPC Web Spy by Brad Callen, and I’ve got to admit it’s one little cool Firefox Plug-in. First I was a bit skeptical about the product. After all, not many free plug-ins live up to the expectations (SEO for Firefox is one of few that does). But I was quite impressed on how easy this tool makes it to spy on others.

Once you download PPC Web Spy, you are going to be asked to restart your Firefox. That’s when great things are going to happen. Once you log back to Google and search for a phrase, you are going to be presented with the following:

The view keywords button allows you to find out the keywords that each advertiser is using to display their ads. Talk about hitting the jackpot.

As you can see in the above image, you get the keywords, the average position, the average CPC, Max CPC, and all that good stuff. You can also see ad per keyword, which should give you an idea about the techniques used by your competitors to achieve a higher CTR.

But that’s not all. You also can expose the destination URL used by these guys (see below).

Now, if you decide to go to with Gold or Platinum editions of PPC Web Spy, you also get a chance to download all the keywords your competitors have, which is pretty convenient. Now, you should be able to see most of the keywords that are used by your competitors, but the domain in question should be at least 45 days old in the Adwords system. This tool is very useful if you want to get a quick report on your competitors or folks advertising in a specific niche.

Download link: PPC Web Spy

You know. I am a firm believer that in this day and age, if you share information with others and try to help others out, it will come back to you some day. That’s why I have decided to share my most secret KW weapon on this blog today. It’s one of the coolest tools that you can find on the Internet, but it’s powerful as well.

Everybody knows what a thesaurus is. A paperback thesaurus is just an unattractive lot of papers that simply don’t belong in the 21st century. I am sure you can use it if you are an English major but for a marketer, a thesaurus book is just too heavy and inefficient to carry. That’s where Visual Thesaurus comes in.

If you have been doing pay per click for a while, you are probably know you simply cannot just compete on the so obvious keywords. It’s always very satisfying to find a set of keywords that bring you good traffic but are cheap enough to play the bidding war with. With Visual Thesaurus you can significantly expand your horizon and find the not so obvious phrases for your campaigns.

Using VT, you can branch out every single core keyword and find replacement keywords to use for your campaigns. Take the word “balance.” VT breaks it down for you and you can dig deeper by clicking on each of the branches.

You can also define relationships, which is very handy. You can choose negative association and get negative keywords for your campaigns.

Now you may look at this software package and tell me, “who needs this?” Believe me, someday you are going to wake up and just totally blank. Visual Thesaurus is going to let you start your engine and do a productive brainstorming session. VT is not only cool but also powerful.  And it’s very cheap. Can’t beat that.

Every marketer has a set of tool that he/she uses to manage their paid campaigns more effectively. Many gurus such as John Reese duly note that the more tools you have access to, the better chance you have to gaining a competitive edge over the folks who don’t have access to those tools. I am a firm believer of that. But obviously a lot of folks get a lot done with only one or two tools.

The tools that I use Use for my PPC campaigns:

Google Adwords Keyword Tool: Google Adwords‘ free keyword tool is the No. 1 keyword tool on the Internet without a doubt. The tool has been improved dramatically by Google, and when you add the Traffic Estimator and other tools available on your Adwords account, Google has one of the best PPC research tools in the market.

SEObook Keyword Toolset: Aaron wall, the legendary SEO expert, certainly knows how to create a keyword research toolset. This guy knows what it takes to be successful and has spent a lot of money to help his readers be successful as well. His SEO tools are great for PPC research as well.

Premium Keyword Research Tool: I do recommend that you get at least one premium keyword tool to complement your free tools. For a long time, I used WordTracker as my favorite keyword tool. But after using Wordze, I really see no reason to go back to WordTracker. Unless WordTracker makes big changes to its offering, Wordze will be my main tool for now. Keyword Discovery is another great tool if you have the cash to spend.

Competitive Intelligence Tools: competitive intelligence tools are very important for my PPC campaigns. These tools allow me to figure out what other people are doing, and what I can do better with my own campaigns. If you have reading my blog, you probably know my favorite too, SpyFu. But I also use Keyword Elite as a complementary tool.

There are many other tools that you can use to manage your PPC campaigns. Keep in mind that the above tools are mostly my keyword tools. I obviously use many analytics and testing tools to optimize my PPC campaigns. The key here is to don’t go overboard with these tools. There are just so many of them on the market. Just pick a couple that you feel are the best and master them so you can get the biggest bang for the buck. You can have all the tools in the world, but if you don’t use them, you are just wasting your money.

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!

Google has just announced that they have finally released AE 6.5 for all you Adwords fanatics. Here is the story:

On Tuesday, we released version 6.5 of AdWords Editor. This release includes several features to help you navigate and manage your account, such as a new Keyword Opportunities tool, horizontal scrolling in the data view, and auto-sizing columns. You can learn more about these and other new features in the release notes.

If you have it, you are going to enjoy using it even more. If you don’t, here is your excuse to get it.

I had been thinking about buying a subscription to SpyFu a month ago. After all, that’s the one tool that gurus seem to agree is a potent competitive intelligence weapon (for those of you not familiar with SpyFu, this is an online tool that allows you to find out what the hottest keywords are, what your competitors are advertising on, and who is spending more in your industry). Most of the data is available for free, but the videos available on the site are more than enough to tempt anyone to try the tool. But the tool has enough merits to justify paying twice the price they are charging for right now.

I have been involved in the financial industry for years now, and you have more affiliates in this market than you have people in my state. Not only that, the costs of pay per click marketing in this market are going through the roof. I have been bidding a branded term (I have permission to do it from the advertiser) and am still paying $8 a click! That’s insane. Even if your merchant is paying you $150 per sale, you are still going to have to deliver a sale with 17 clicks to break even. Now that wouldn’t be an issue in the credit card industry as you can get 1-3% conversion rate without too much trouble, but when you are talking about the mortgage niche, then it’s tougher to get people approved and get the credit.

A month ago, I finally decided to jump in and see what all the fuss was about with SpyFu. Here is what you can get from SpyFu for free:

• Top 100 SEM Spenders
• Keywords with Highest Cost Per Click
• Keywords with Most Clicks per Day
• SEO Top 100
• Keywords with Highest Cost Per Day
• Top 100 Ad Buyers
• Biggest Changes in CPC
• Largest Budget Changes
• Largest Search Engine Shift
• Largest Cost/Day Changes
• Largest Clicks/Day Changes

So the good thing is that you can taste the information that you do get with SpyFu. But if you want the most up to date data with SpyFu and would like to extract every keyword under the sun that your competitors are using, then a subscription to SpyFu is a must.

What I like about SpyFu so far are the two items that I have in bold in the above list. By figuring out the keywords that are getting the highest CPCs, you can create Adsense campaigns to make quick cash with content heavy Adsense sites. And what about the all powerful clicks per day information! People think Google trends is hot. But don’t ever go blind into a market without doing proper keyword research and that’s exactly what this report show you. The latest information about the popularity of core keywords for your campaigns.

There is so much good stuff to talk about when it comes to SpyFu, but I strongly suggest that you watch the videos and find that out for yourself. And don’t forget to check SpyFu U.K if you are running campaigns for that area. Watch this space for more information on SpyFu.

It’s amazing how many people just ignore Google Adwords tool just because it’s free. It’s one thing to use the Adwords tool to find a couple of keywords, but you should definitely be using the tool to analyze your pages and add LSI keywords to them as well. Remember that Google is paying more attention to LSI these days to determine relevancy on your pages, so you need to make sure you use the tools that Google provides you to optimize your landing pages for Google. Now I have explained on SEOABC how you can use Google Adwords Keyword Tool to optimize your pages for Google. But you can go even beyond that with your landing pages.

Unless you haven’t been paying attention, Google has slapped and double slapped a lot of folks recently. You get up one day and your minimum bid is $5! Why? Because Google doesn’t find your site relevant enough. So how do you go about fixing that? By figure out what is it that is making Google doubt your site. Use the Google Adwords Keyword tool and find out what keywords are deemed relevant to your site according to Google. If you are trying to optimize a page for the word “diamond” but the tool doesn’t seem to find your site relevant to that keyword, then you have some work to do. You may have to tweak your content, headers, and tags to get Google to find your page relevant for that keyword. In addition, you should definitely use the “related terms” part to add LSI keywords to your pages. For instance, if Google finds the word “earrings” relevant to your main keyword which is “diamond,” then make sure you include that word somehow to make your site look relevant to Google.

This stuff is really no rocket science but more about paying attention to smallest details. Google is providing you all the tools that you need to be successful. Sure, you can use paid services such as Wordze to conduct better keyword research, but you should be just fine without it. Sometimes having too many tools can decrease your productivity and affect your results negatively!

Google has made some changes to their Adwords keyword tool and now they show search estimate numbers per keyword which is very useful. After the death of Yahoo keyword tool, I thought there was little chance Google would entertain this idea, but they have finally done it!

You pretty much get the average search volume and search volume per month which makes the Google Adwords tool a must use keyword tool! Wish Google had done this earlier but better late than never.