Keyword Locator is new keyword research & monitoring software which sells for $87. When I tried to download it there were download errors, but Frenchie Sano was quick to reply and help me with the download. On to the reveiw... Features:

• Like many of the other current keyword research tools on the market, it pulls keyword suggestions, search volumes, and bid prices from Overture.

• Set which Google URL and Overture market you want to review ads from, and reports the number of competing ads.
• Select Yahoo!, Google, Overture, or digging to grab your various keywords.
• Easy data import and export.
• Shows the number of competing ads in each engine.
• Allows you to filter keywords by a term or select a group of them. After you select a set of results you can scroll through the URLs, ad titles, common words in ad copy, and bid prices by search engine. (please note Google AdWords does not give out ad price and search volume data).
• By collecting and sorting the combined keyword data you can see what terms & emotional triggers people are using most frequently in your marketplace.
• Has a character stripper and ad formatter. The character stripper could also be improved by letting you also remove character sequences by doing something like placing the phrase or character set in [] or something like that.
• Tool also includes FindWhat & Enhance Interactive.
• Can access data via proxy.
• The format tool makes it easy for you to format keywords as exact match terms, phrases, or broad match terms. It would be nice if they added an all feature to that for those who may want to bid on all levels of relevancy matching.

Things that would Make Keyword Locator Better:
Many people access keyword data from the same sources. This means:

• this data is going to be inclined to being spammed or thrown off course by automated bots and marketers.

• These portions of the market are going to be much more competitive (and thus less profitable) than words from sources of unique or limited data.
• Outside of good sex and choice narcotics almost nothing feels better than being the only bidder for a term which converts at 30% and only costs a nickel a click.

I like free access to data and information (I only sell my ebook because it is my main functional business model and I have not been creative enough to think of another yet), but sometimes paying for data creates a barrier which adds value to the usefulness of the data. It would be cool to see a tool like this interface with data from WordTracker, Keyword Intelligence, & Keyword Discovery.

I think Keyword Locator could also be improved by adding:

• a term combination tool (like the permutator)

• a misspelled terms tool
• allowing users to set custom term operations. for example, I should be able to enter www.blah.com and output the terms:
  • blahcom

  • wwwblah
  • etc
• Interface with or link to other common keyword tools & ideas such as:
  • a thesaurus

  • Statistically Improbable Phrases
  • a lexical database

Overall Keyword Locator is pretty good software, but a few of the ideas listed above could make it a bit better.

If you spend signifincantly on PPC advertising it can likely help save you time and money, but some things can't be automated. Tools which show you what your competitors are already doing may not show you how to beat them (as you can't put think creatively into software).

Keyword Locator can help you as one tool to use with PPC campaigns, but you may also want to use other tools and research databases & techniques as well.

[Update: a WMW thread highlighted a potential problem with Keyword Locator]