ISpionage Review

iSpionage is a newer player in the spy tool market. They are much more PPC oriented than organic SEO oriented. They offer 3 tool sets:

  • Keyword and Domain Research
  • Keyword Monitor
  • PPC Campaign Builder

Keyword and Domain Research

They index the top ten results in Google, Yahoo, and Bing (although I only saw G and Y).

ispionage overview

They give you breakdowns of common spy tool elements such as:

  • Competitors and Overlapping Keywords
  • Ad Copy
  • Keyword Specific Ads
  • CPC
  • Average Search Volume
  • Average Rank
  • And so on..

The one really neat thing they offer is overlapping keywords between Yahoo and Google for a particular domain. I'm not aware of another spy tool that does that.

Their database does not seem to be very deep but they are newer so that's to be expected.

The do show overlapping keywords, total keyword count, and a monthly budget under their competition tab.

ispionage competitors

Here is another spot where they compare Google and Yahoo, this time for overlapping keywords between sites.

ispionage overlap

Keyword Monitor

This lets you search by domain name or keyword to get ideas for keywords to add into your campaign. You can also add your own manually after the keyword research option. Keyword Monitor will show you the following for your campaign + competition:

keyword monitor ispionage

The impression share is not something I've noticed in most other tools and the other 4 metrics can be useful in determining which competitor might be a bit savior in the PPC game. Other metrics they will show you on the keyword level include whether or not the keyword has direct ranking affiliates, the average CPC/search volume, and total advertiser counts in Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

The tool also shows you related keywords you may wish to add to your campaign or just place on your watch list.

PPC Campaign Builder

The campaign builder allows you to search for keywords via a keyword or domain name input. The steps are as follows:

Keyword Clean Up

This is where you can weed out keywords that contain certain words, are duplicates, or have special characters. You can also choose to remove extra spaces if needed.

ispionage ppc builder

Keyword Grouping

Here you can set up ad groups and campaigns right from within iSpionage. It also gives you the option to create one ad group per keyword if you want to get that granular

creating ad groups

Campaign Builder

Here you can input bid prices for Broad/Phrase/Exact match bids, set up your ads, and input the url. Then you can export for use in Google, Yahoo, or Bing PPC campaigns.

iSpionage Coupons

They offer a coupon code for 25% off for all products. The promotional code is: EOYSALE10

This promo discount voucher will expire on 12/25/2010.

In Closing

iSpionage has some promise and seems to be much more into the PPC market than the SEO market. If that's the case then they are taking on some pretty big players as many of the spy tools offer both PPC and SEO data sets. They have some unique features and it will be interesting to see how they develop their product going forward.

Published: March 20, 2010 by Eric Covino in marketing

Comments

Uttara Khan
April 15, 2010 - 2:17pm

and have you tried other tools? and what tools?
have you tried semrush for example? i think it is rather competitive.

April 15, 2010 - 9:59pm

Lots of reviews here
http://www.seobook.com/review-spy-tools
and of course we have reviewed SEM Rush ... we rank right below them in the search results for their brand keywords :D

dale_larsen@sbc...
August 17, 2013 - 10:18pm

I am new to SEO and joined for some up-to-date info.
here we have another "review" of spy tools that are ALL 3 years old.

considering how SEO changes (according to YOU SEO types)
I think UPDATES to these reviews would be in order!

granted they do spell out the differences between the different spy tools.
Mind you since they are 3 years OLD, who knows how valid they are.
certainly not where price is conserned.

August 18, 2013 - 1:01am

...then certainly we would. However it is quite absurd to expect someone to keep spending money on tools and keep spending money updating older reviews over and over again if the review cost more money to write than it generated over the past few years.

And if any tool runs a pricing special or raises prices, we could have a full time worker that does nothing but review those sorts of changes & a slight difference in price from an old review doesn't really diminish the value of the review. If you think a tool looks decent & the price is in the same ballpark then a 10% or 20% shift in price is for the most part irrelevant. People generally only buy said subscriptions if they think there is a significant ROI potential beyond the upfront cost...the price is really more relevant when considering how long to keep any particular subscription active, but seeing the baseline features & testing the tool for a while would really be what is needed to determine that...no matter how valuable any tool is to a particular reviewer, the potential customer is going to place far more weight on their own cash flow and how they choose to use the tool...particularly over the longrun after they have already subscribed for a few months.

I tend to have a couple subscriptions active at any time in each niche, but I selectively dip in and out of certain tools from time to time based on unique features to them (like unlimited data download or a deeper database or fresher data or some other such feature).

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