Today, we are going to look at iSpionage which is another keyword research and competitive intelligence site. It offers several nice features that will help anyone jump start their pay per click campaigns. Using iSpionage, you can track competitors in your niche and see whether or not it will be a profitable for you to enter as well. Then, when you decide to start your own campaign, you can leverage your competitors experience in the area by accessing their ad copy and landing pages and using the good things you see in your own campaigns. In this way, iSpionage will save you the time and money that’s usually reserved for starting up a PPC Campaign.
iSpionage works around the concept of projects. For a new PPC campaign you would first create a project, with a couple of main keywords you want to monitor. You can then use iSpionage to come up with a list of related keywords that can be easily added to your project. Once you drill down into a project, you can see your keywords and look at essential information like how many clicks per day each keyword gets, and what’s its average CPC. You’ll also see the number of ads running for each keyword on all 3 major pay per click engines: Google, Yahoo and MSN. This is really useful information as it allows you see how competitive the market is, and whether there are spots for you to enter. The other column to notice is the Days Monitored. For more popular keywords, you will see that iSpionage has been monitoring them for more than a couple of weeks, while some of the more niche keywords haven’t been monitored at all. For these niche keywords, you’ll have to show some patience and wait a few days for iSpionage to gather some relevant results.
Once iSpionage has gathered adequate data for your keywords, you can drill down into the most promising ones and take a look at what particular competitors are advertising for each keyword. Here you can see who the most dominant competitors are and figure out what sorts of ads they are running. Drill down further, and you can see which ppc engines they are running their ads on, where they rank for a particular keyword, and if they are not cloaking their links you can see if they are actually the Merchant or an Affiliate.
iSpionage contains two modes for performing keyword research. The first is the relevant keywords generator. What it does is take your existing keywords and finds other keywords related to them. This is a great way to find long-tail keywords for your niche. iSpionage claims that unlike other keyword generators, it will filter out the junk keywords and only return you a list of relevant keywords. This is quite useful as creating successful campaigns relies on the ability to create tightly focused ad groups.
The second keyword research option is iSpionage’s competitive keyword finder. To use it, you first search for a keyword which will bring up a list of advertisers. Or if you have a url in mind you can use that as well. This gives you a quick snapshot of all the competitors in your space. One great use of this is to see if which advertisers are using all 3 networks. This usually means that an advertisers has at least one profitable campaign on a network, and has expanded to the other 2.
One thing that sets iSpionage apart is its free custom keyword research ability. If for some reason, iSpionage does not contain results for a search, you can submit a custom search request. This will get iSpionage’s team of research specialists to manually start looking at the keywords in this specific niche. After they have completed their research, which usually takes 2-4 days, they will send you an email telling you to re-do your search. This is a free part of your membership and quite unique to iSpionage.
One other nice feature of iSpionage is the competitive alerts feature. After you set it up, iSpionage will alert you when new advertisers using the keywords from your project appear on any of the 3 search engines. If you have a trademark on certain keywords for example, this feature is a nice way to find out if people are using it inappropriately, and take action against them if necessary. The alert feature is also quite useful just to see when you have a new competitor to deal with so you can plan any actions.
All in all, iSpionage is a worthy product in the competitive intelligence and keyword research space. It offers quite a few unique features that differentiate it from the many other keyword research tools. I really like the fact that it tracks more than Google Adwords, and actually has data from Yahoo and MSN as well. For those who want to get up to speed quickly with iSpionage, they have some excellent video tutorials on their site. Just spend an hour with them, and you’ll be up and running in no time. iSpionage offers a couple of flexible subscription plans. Their iSpy Ranger plan goes for $59 a month. With this plan, you’ll miss a few features like the competitive alerts. With their iSpy Pro package, you’ll basically get the whole feature set for $79 a month. If you want to test out the iSpionage service, make sure to try their free trial. The free trial limits the number of keywords you can track, but should give you a good flavor of how iSpionage works. So give iSpionage a shot, and see if it can’t help you with your PPC campaigns.
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I’ve been a subscriber for a few months with ispionage, and loving it! They just launched a new feature that makes keyword research, grouping and creating PPC campaign a real simple process.
It used to take me hours and multiple software to get a solid PPC campaign with tightly group keywords and adcopy up and running. This tool really streamlines the whole process. I wouldn’t want to go back to my excel spreadsheet for sure