Google Adwords is the ultimate advertising venue for online marketers and businesses. It gives you access to one of the largest pools of websites around in addition to Google’s advertising listings. Marketers love Google advertising services as it comes bundled with a bunch of complementary services. One of those useful services is Google Adwords Keyword Tool. It’s a powerful tool if you want to get your keyword research done and create a powerful seed list for your campaigns. Best of all, it’s free. So there is no reason not to take advantage of it.

Unfortunately, many marketers assume that Google Adwords Keyword Tool is the be all end all of all keyword tools. Have you ever wondered why people pay for premium keyword tools when they can just use Google Adwords Keyword Tool? There is a reason for that. The tool does provide you with some decent information, but it doesn’t give you a complete list. I have also found the stats from WordTracker or Keyword Discovery to be more useful that numbers and stats provided by Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Premium keyword tools may cost you some decent amount of money, but when used in conjunction with Google’s tools, they can help you create a better, more comprehensive keyword list.

Keyword Discovery: one of the most powerful keyword tools on the market. While many prefer using Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery has its own advantages. It comes with a variety of features to help you slice and dice your keyword lists.

WordTracker: has been around for years. It’s used by many SEO and advertising professionals. If you are into digging and digging more, WordTracker is a reliable too to consider.

Wordze: has improved a lot in the past few months. For a long time, Wordze wasn’t considered as a true contender to WordTracker and Keyword Discovery. But now it is one of the best keyword tools on the market. Comes with a ton of features and can help you build great lists fast.

Keyword Country: a must have tool for those of you who are focused on niche marketing. You can use it to find new keywords, spy on other people’s successful campaigns, and even improve your landing page’s conversions.

What’s your favorite keyword tool for online advertising?

The pay per click game used to be a whole lot easier 7 or 8 years ago. The rules were simple and the number of people competing for those top spots was not really that high. These days, unless you are advertising about some obscure niche, you will have to go against a decent number of competitors that are well-versed in the game of PPC. So you’ll have to work hard to gain the edge over these folks. That’s what iSpionage is designed to do. It’s a comprehensive keyword research tool that lets you take your PPC and SEO campaigns to the next level and expand your keyword list like never before.

You can use this tool to dig up information on your competitors based on a specific domain name or a keyword. If you are getting into a whole new market, this tool can help you get a head-start. It breaks down the information across multiple search engines, so you get some real actionable information from this tool.

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Google Adwords is the cash cow for most online marketers. You can always make money with other networks, but if you are concerned with traffic, Google Adwords is a must try. In order to get the best out of your Adwords campaign, you need to have tight AdWords and the right campaign structure. Not only that, you need to be bidding on the right keywords to get the most out of your budget. No two keywords are created equal, and you’d be surprised how conversion rate could differ between two almost identical keywords. You can always use Google Adwords Keyword Tool to start your keyword list, but there are a lot of decent premium keyword tools that let you optimize your keyword list and find keywords that convert like crazy.

There are many premium Adwords keyword tools out there. You can literally spend thousands of dollars each month to subscribe to these services, but at the end of the day, you want to make sure you get the right set of keyword tools that give you the biggest bang for your buck. If you have been using those free tools for a while and want to take your game to the next level, here are 5 killer keyword tools you should try:

SpyFu: the best tool to get some spying done on your competitors and find new good keywords to target. SpyFu Kombat makes it easy to compare your campaigns against others. Ad history helps you track your competitors and find out about their tendencies. And you can always export your competitors keywords and find out which ones you are not using.

Keyword Spy: another killer spying tool for online marketers. It also has a lot of awesome features for affiliate marketers. It’s a bit more pricey than SpyFu but does come with features for more advanced online marketers.

Wordze: WordTracker used to be the king of keyword research tools. But that has changed since the latest upgrade that Wordze has gone through. It’s hands down your best friend if you are into PPC and SEO. Provides you with all the metrics you need to find out whether a keyword is worth going after.

PPC Bully: one of the most affordable and more popular keyword research tools designed specifically for PPC professionals. It allows you to study other people’s campaigns and see what’s working for them.

Adwords Accelerator: another great tool to find high converting keywords for your Google Adwords campaigns. It provides lots of keyword ideas for your market, allowing you to expand the scope of your advertising and lets you quickly extract keywords from your competitors’ websites.

There you have it. Most of these tools are pretty cheap but they let you get more out of your Adwords campaigns fast. If you want to go beyond the free tools offered by Google and other players on the market, the above tools are a great place to start.

Recently, I had a chance to review Google Ambush by Andrew X. It’s not that I am looking for more ways to spend money on PPC products, but rather you want to see what new PPC products are teaching these days. Google Ambush is a new product designed to help you dominate the world of Google. Unlike other pay per click marketing product on the market, Google Ambush focuses on a comprehensive approach to set up campaigns and make profit on them on Google. There are many pay per click courses that teach you the basics on how to run your own Adwords campaigns. With Google Ambush, you can easily find what products to choose to make money online. So in a sense, it is designed for pay per click affiliate marketers.

Google Ambush teaches you how to find products, the right keywords, and the right structure for your ad campaigns. Whether you are new to affiliate marketing or just want to pick up a few new tricks, you are covered with Google Ambush. Here is what I liked about Google Ambush:

• Plan: you can’t have success online without a plan. There is a difference between barely making it online and having a profitable business. Google Ambush covers all areas of niche marketing and even shows you how to create your landing pages and track your results fast. You can use the blueprint provided in the course to launch profitable campaigns one after another.
• Software: nothing can replace a good software that can automate parts or your whole business operation. A lot of marketers fail as they keep focusing on tactics rather than strategies. The software finds you profitable niches, helps you gain access to lots of profit making products, allows you to do your own keyword research, and even allows you to spy on your competitors (read all about it here).
• PPC Tools: Google Ambush not only allows you to find hot products, it helps you create your own Ad campaigns fast. You can create multiple ads and campaigns fast. And the split-test functionality is integrated into the software. So you get it all in one package.
• Landing Pages: Google Ambush comes with everything you need to create your landing pages fast. All you have to do is use the template provided to you to customize your landing pages and go live fast!
• Optimization: this was by far my favorite part. I am obsessive when it comes to testing and am all for software packages that help me test things out more easily. With Google Ambush, you get a software package that has everything you need to test your campaigns fast and find out what’s not working.

Overall, I was very impressed with Google Ambush. You are not getting an e-book that may or may not help you make more money online. You are getting a comprehensive software package that helps you find niche products, conduct your market research, find the right keywords, create your campaigns, build your landing pages, and keep testing until you pass out. Google If you are planning to outsource your Adwords processes and spend more time doing more important things with your business, you should give Google Ambush a try.

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.

If you have been using Google Adwords for a while, you are certainly familiar with the pain that was minimum bid. Google changed the concept to 1st-page bid but the underlying concept is the same. If your landing page is deemed to be not optimized for your search term, you are going to have to pay more to stay on the first page. After all Ad Rank = Quality Score * mCPC.

Many of us have been slapped by Google in the past. You start a campaign, and you run it for a while for $0.20 per click just to find out after a couple of weeks that Google is asking for a minimum of $5 per click to show you on the first page (not the first position). That’s really painful and if you are running affiliate offers through Adwords, I doubt you can make enough revenue to cover your costs.

Now people pray to God hoping for Google to change its mind and reduce your min bids. Here is the thing. God’s not going to fix your problem. There is actually a simple way to get around it. All you got to do is use Google Adwords keyword tool to figure out what Google sees on your page.

Just select the second option (Website content) and use your own URL to figure out what keywords Google comes up with your site. If the keyword that you are bidding on is on that list, then that could be why you are not getting the excellent quality score that you have always been wanting.

Your listing’s quality score is not just about the keywords that are on your page. You have to truly optimize your landing page to ensure Google that your page is relevant to the phrase you are bidding on, so don’t expect to get “great” quality score by just dropping keywords on your pages. But Google’s free tool does allow you to find out what areas you can improve on. With tools from Google, who needs paid tools!

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.

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.