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KeywordSpy and AdWords – find out your competitors’ keywords

KeywordSpy is a pretty valuable tool if you spend more than a few dollars a month on your AdWords advertising. It let’s you find out what keywords your competitors are using and if they happen to be using some that you haven’t thought about, the reason is that they are probably making money from them. And you should be too.

I’ve often felt that there is a lot of intellectual property tied up in a well run AdWords account. It’s not just the keywords that you’ve researched that have value, it’s the Ad Group and Campaign structure as well as Campaign settings.

for example, if after paintstaking research you’ve found that clicks are more profitable from the South East of the UK than from the North West, that is valuable knowledge and you wouldn’t want your competitors to know it.

But with keywords, part of your account is exposed. Your competitors can see your ads against your keywords (unless they’ve blocked you IP address). This means that give time and effort, they could eventually find out all the keywords you are using. But lets face the facts: this will take ages. Sure, it would give them a valuable insight into your AdWords account but it would take them ages and on balance would probably not be worth doing.

However, new technology is springing up constantly to help online marketers and what KeywordSpy does is research your competitors for you. In just a few seconds you can find out what keywords they have been advertising against and for how long. You can also get some idea of how much they are spending.

For example, yesterday I looked at one of my competitors to see how much they were paying per click for the phrase “adwords consultant“. It was pretty revealing.

If you are just starting out with an entirely new AdWords account or perhaps are thinking of expanding your business into a new area then KeywordSpy will save you time, money and effort. It may also point to opportunities you’ve missed. For example, a few years back I was steadily generating a few hundred pounds a month from a single keyword that was costing me a few pounds. If my competitors had known about it, they could have started to share my revenue which would have been annoying!

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