KeywordSpy - Can You Really See a PPC Advertisers Keyword List?

Anyone doing Internet marketing these days, especially Affiliate Marketing, has seen or heard about Ad Spying software. These programs, such as ZamDoo, Google Cash Detective, AdSpyPro, and Undercover Profits, all work by tracking the ads that appear in search engines for particular search terms. The purpose is to see which ads are being run on a consistent basis, so that you can deduce 'profitable' products and niches. The underlying premise is that since these ads cost money, anyone paying to run an ad consistently must be making money, otherwise they'd stop paying for the ad.

Through this method, affiliate marketers can 'spy' on other marketers, seeing which products and ads are 'profitable', and either copy the ad, copy the offer, or both.

The problem with this 'profitable ad' premise is that knowing an ad is profitable doesn't mean you know why. Specifically, each 'profitable' ad has a list of keywords that it shows up for. Some of those keywords lead to sales, some do not. Without knowing which is which, simply knowing an ad is 'profitable' does you no good.

One of the ways Internet marketers address this is to use large keyword lists: if you cover all the likely keywords that ad is using, you'll certainly cover the profitable ones. However, you will like lose money from all those that aren't profitable.

Various keyword research tools have come to market lately aimed at addressing this problem. To date, none have them have been very effective because they weren't able to show which keywords were used by which ads.

Recently a new 'class' of keyword research tools have come to market. One of them, KeywordSpy purports to provide specific keyword lists for a given ad. They do this by "data mining" the log files from ISPs, extracting the keywords that triggered the ads in question.

I decided to give KeywordSpy a 'test drive'; using both Google Cash Detective and ZamDoo to generate my list of 'profitable' ads, I then fed that inforation into KeywordSpy. What came back was quite impressive: the exact ads I was tracking, along with the specific keyword lists that were being used by those advertisers.

This type of information is extremely valuable. By further refining the keyword lists that KeywordSpy returns, using a program such as Affiliate Radar for instance, I can further boost my 'profitability' by identifying and pruning the keywords that are less profitable, or money-losers.

By creatively combing the capabilities of Ad Spying, ad-specific keyword mining, and keyword tracking, Affiliate Marketers have a nearly 'fool-proof' system for profitable PPC Pay Per Click marketing!

Michael Ullman is a leading Affiliate Marketing Expert, and with his partner Melanie manage Improve Your Internet Marketing, a blog for beginner and pro Internet Marketers, and the widely-read Melanies Tips newsletter of Affiliate Marketing Tips, Tricks, and Strategies.