Keyword Spy Review

Keyword Spy Logo

Keyword Spy offers 3 different accounts.

  • Research
  • Tracking
  • Professional

The countries available within a Keyword Spy account are:

Keyword Spy Country List

No other competitor really comes close to the breadth of their country offerings.

Keyword Spy Research Account

Keyword Spy's Research account gives you access to the following data

  • PPC Ads (ad copy, the keyword, estimated search volume, estimated CPC, the position last seen of an ad and it's average position, total days seen/days checked. You can also see the ad url and destination url of the ad in addition to other keywords being bid on for that particular ad, as well as an estimated ROI.
  • PPC Keywords - showing individual keywords, ROI, search volume, CPC, total profitable ads, affiliate ads on that keyword, days seen, last/first seen
  • Organic Keywords - showing individual keywords, position in the SERPS, total search results, estimated CPC, and the URL
  • Competitors in PPC and Organic results.
  • Sub-domains

Domain Overview

The research portion does *not* include organic or PPC overlap coverage, which kind of stinks especially when you consider the price point they charge.

You get access to their Top 1000 sites and keyword reports which can be previewed here.

You can search by keyword as well. A Keyword search will show you:

  • PPC Ad Copies with Keyword in them
  • Up to 1000 related Keywords
  • Misspelled Keywords
  • PPC Competitors
  • Organic Competitors

Keyword Search Overview

You can filter with these metrics but you can only apply 1 filter to the results at a time. Which can be bothersome if you are doing large scale research as they limit the exported data to 50,000 keywords.

Research Account Metrics

  • ROI- they compute this as (Days Seen*Percentage Seen/Number of Days Seen since Last Seen). Below is a screen shot of their formula. Again, this is based on the assumption that the PPC advertiser is shrewd and on top of things. I don't particularly care for this metric. ROI to person A can be much different than ROI to person B for a variety of reasons.
  • Keyword Spy ROI Picture

  • First/Last Seen- Last seen is the last day KS saw the ad (they scan daily) and First Seen shows the first day KS saw the ad (I believe its back to August of 09 as of this writing).
  • Profitable Ads - Ads that are profitable based on their internal metrics (like ROI and such) out of total number of ads.
  • Affiliate Ads - Ads that are affiliate ads (based on destination url) out of total ads found.

Screen shot of PPC keyword tab showing the above mentioned metrics:

Keyword Spy PPC Keyword Tab

Keyword Spy's Tracking Account

The Tracking account option gives you real time tracking in Google, Yahoo, and Bing for your PPC and Organic campaigns. This can be useful in checking out your coverage and competition across all three engines. You can also benchmark your data with the competition's scraped data.

Of course, the question is do YOU want your campaigns being monitored by a spy tool that makes its money but showing advertisers their competition's organic and PPC data?? :-)

You can read about more of their tracking/alert/coverage type options here, but outside of tracking and coverage you get:

  • Landing Page Intelligence - shows current landing page, ad copy, and destination URL for a particular landing page.
  • Landing page intelligence

  • Organic and PPC overlap data (only between 2 sites) and quite frankly, this is much more research than tracking and should really be included in the research account IMO.
  • Benchmarking in PPC/Organic Listings (below is a screen shot of the organic one, they are fairly similar)
  • Organic Benchmarking

So the tracking account is really more for tracking your campaigns across the 3 big PPC engines with some nifty benchmarking and gap analysis features but I don't see it as being overly useful for smaller PPC advertisers, although the coverage options might be a good fit for those in competitive markets across Google, Yahoo, and Bing. In general, Spy Tools aren't all that great at looking into smaller sites and markets simply because the resources required to be accurate with somewhat sparse data would be overkill and far to costly. This is why I do not really feel the tracking option is going to be a good fit outside of pretty big PPC advertisers.

Professional Account

The Pro account combines the Research and Tracking account features (up's the overall trackable keywords, export limit, and query limit) plus gives you access to a couple new features:

  • Affiliate Intelligence
  • Affiliate Reports

Affiliate Intelligence

This tool gives you access to look at products and ads being used by 132 affiliate networks.

Affiliate Intelligence

You can click through on any network and be shown their offers by URL with searchable affiliate ads for those products.

Affiliate Reports gives you access to big players in the affiliate marketing space such as CJ, LinkShare, Clickbank, ShareAsale, etc. Here you can access top affiliate products and top affiliates by product id and affiliate id respectively. You can also use affiliate product and affiliates id's to search in the destination URL field to try and find additional products/ads they may be promoting.

Affiliate Reports

Keyword Spy mentions something about "Anti-cloaking" technology but they do not elaborate on it. However, color me skeptical that these affiliate options are able to uncover properly cloaked links by top affiliates. So while this may be good for help in looking at potential affiliate products, as well as finding affiliates who do not cloak their links, I'm really not overly impressed with these features but they can be somewhat useful when first starting out.

In Closing

Keyword Spy is a feature rich membership and they have a deep database. For me, if I had to pick just one tool I would opt for either SemRush or SpyFu as both supply solid PPC/SEO competitive intel at a much more reasonable price. Although, if I were a serious PPC player their tracking account might be quite nice (still have reservations about giving a spy tool company my campaign data though). Another great feature for Keyword Spy is their regional databases...they cover many areas missed by some of the other competitive research tools.

Published: March 20, 2010 by Eric Covino in marketing

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