PPC Spying Tactics in 2009
It’s going to be a fun world in 2009, fellow affiliates. Prepare yourselves to fight ’till death!
I mean, let the games begin 
As many of you know, I’m a competitive research junky. I think the best way to get into a new niche is to deconstruct the top competition: figure out what they are doing, what keywords and landing pages they are using, etc– then build a site using the same formula but better.
The beauty of spying on the competition is they’ve done all the hard work for you. If you see an affiliate advertising on the same keyword for a few weeks in a competitive niche with the same landing page, ya think he’s making a profit? Most likely.
Here’s an inside look at iSpionage:
Okay- now onto the fun stuff…
With the help of Leon and friends from iSpionage, we created an experiment to monitor some of the most expensive Adwords keywords.
The logic behind the experiment was that if someone is paying upwards of $5 to $15+ dollars per click, there is something that we can learn from them.
After a few weeks of gathering data, I downloaded the iSpionage report containing 51,996 ads from Google, Yahoo & MSN from 885 keywords.
If you are curious, here’s the list of high paying adwords keywords.
One of the first things I did was check out the most popular types of words these advertisers are using in their PPC ads…
Here’s the most common words found in description 1 among advertisers. Here’s the description 2 word frequency.
The average length of the Display URL is 23 characters.
18% of advertisers are showing a sub-page like www.mydomain.com/subpage.
65% of advertisers are using www. in their display URL.
8% are using a subdomain.
83% are using a .com domain
Only 40% are using landing pages.
Okay that’s all the analysis I have time for today.
Also check out my interview with the lead developers of iSpionage.
December 30th, 2008 at 10:41 am
Josh,
The word frequency cvs’ are blank when I download and open. Not sure if it’s a user error on my part but I’d like to look at them. Cool post with some interesting findings.
December 30th, 2008 at 10:53 am
Should work now.
December 31st, 2008 at 4:05 am
Hey Josh, thanks for mentioning iSpionage, I’d never heard of them. Question, you mentioned monitoring thousands of keywords through them, but the Pro membership only let’s you monitor up to 250 keywords? Do you have the Agency level membership?
December 31st, 2008 at 10:52 am
Hey Doug..
Leon from iSpionage helped me structure this experiment and provided the additional keyword monitoring.
December 31st, 2008 at 3:20 pm
OK, well, it sounds like a great service. So, how you go about selecting the top 100-250 keywords to monitor?
January 2nd, 2009 at 1:47 pm
BTW, I use isponage.com as well. The tool is great and you get a lot of data out of it if you want to go into a new niche. But only useful if you’re an aggressive marketer who is continually setting up new campaigns in new niches.
If you a conservative affiliate or a part time affiliate, who is settled two or three niches on auto pilot, then you could be paying $100 every month and not using it. I haven’t used the tool for quite sometime and I’m paying for it. But a great tool otherwise.
January 5th, 2009 at 2:17 am
You mentioned that only 40% used a landing page? Does this mean that the remaining 60% were direct linking or that they just used adwords to drive traffic to another page on their site?
January 23rd, 2009 at 3:10 pm
So easy to block and fool these spy bots with htaccess.
Data is so freaking inaccurate to boot.