Ispionage Review- The Keyword research tool

The success of your PPC campaign depends upon finding the right combination of keyword, ad copy and ad position,Competition and reach to customer.

The process generally starts with researching and creating extensive, wide-ranging keyword lists. Then, comes building and launching campaigns with e keywords. The aim of this phase is to get a idea of which keywords have more conversions or potential. The final, and ongoing phase is optimizing the campaign, which includes: removing the not profirable keywords, expanding the profitable ones, adjusting ad-copy and keyword bids until you find a profitable keyword

Once you’ve found your profitable keywords you need to guard them like a Eagle, because they don’t come easy.

To build a successful PPC campaign, you need to have a Focused mindset, instead of a “sprint” mindset. It is an ongoing loop of: analyze-adapt-get results-analyze-adapt-get results. This process is certainly much easier if you have the right tools in your tool kit. At iSpionage we have designed a unique tool that helps you with this process. Our tool kit contains:

1. Keyword & Domain Research
2. Keyword Monitoring
3. PPC Campaign Builder

Ispionage Video Review

1: Keyword & Domain Research Module

Using iSpionage Keyword & Domain Research, you can leverage your top competitors’ keyword research and campaign optimization efforts.

With just one click, you can learn which keywords your competitors use. With that same click, you will receive access to all of your competitors’ keywords, as well as estimates of the keyword search traffic, ads, ad positioning, and CPC data.

Below is a screen shot of what you get when you enter the domain “Godaddy.com” in the search bar.

With the advertiser summary, you will get:

• An estimate of their PPC budget
• # of clicks per month
• Google & Yahoo PPC keywords
• Working ad-copy associated with each keyword

Here is a screen shot of the advertiser’s ad copy history with first seen and last seen dates. This information lets you see which ad copy was effective for which keyword.

If you are interested in generating more keywords for your campaign, you can just type in a keyword and iSpionage will give you the top competitors in both Google and Yahoo.

Additionally, you will also get a list of strongly related keywords that you can further expand upon.

Screen shot of keyword results: web hosting

The nice thing about iSponage’s keyword research tool, is that you have access to data from Google as well as Yahoo.

To have an optimal PPC campaign, you should understand the competitive environment. This tool can be used to analyze competitors’ keyword-ad copy-landing page strategy, so you can out-strategize the competition.

2: Keyword Monitor

Whether you are entering a new market, or you want to monitor certain keyword groups like your profitable keywords, you will find the Keyword Monitor from iSponage to be your best friend.

With Keyword Monitor you will learn:

• Who are your top competitors are in each keyword group.

• The impression share that goes to your website, and your competitors’ websites. Which you can use to measure your ad coverage compared to the other advertisers.
  

• Competitors’ ad copy tests and results.

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You can also set email alerts so that you are notified when your competitors change ad copy, add more keywords, or when a new competitor arrives on the scene.

Keyword Monitor allows you to zoom into other advertisers’ PPC campaigns, allowing you to analyze: how they structure their ad groups, ad copy history, ad positioning, landing pages, etc.

With this intelligence you put your business into position to grab the market from your competitors.

3: PPC Campaign Builder

The PPC campaign builder helps the user create a PPC campaign, starting by generating keywords, continuing to creating keyword groups and writing ad-copies, and ultimately finishing with launching campaigns onto Google, Yahoo, and Bing in a quick and effective fashion.

Start by typing in your base keyword and let the tool generate the list of related keywords. Your next step will be to select those keywords you want to focus on (like in the previous steps, average search volume and advertisers’ competition will help you to choose).

Clean Up Keyword Lists

You can now go to the “Keyword Clean Up” tab to sort and clean up the list:

• Sort the list & Remove duplicates
• Keep / Remove lines containing any specified word
• Remove the specified characters (e.g. @$#/%^&*~_=+)

Group the Keywords

Start by giving a name to your campaign for further reference. Then, provide the grouping criteria:

• Create a group by base word (Keep lines containing this word); AND / OR
• Create a group by excluding some words from the list AND / OR
• Create a group based on the number of words in a phrase (Keep lines with the number of keywords).

Don’t forget to give each group a name (I suggest giving each a descriptive name based on the grouping criteria: e.g. “3-word”, “no-stop words”, etc):

Build PPC Campaign

When you are done grouping your keywords, you can go to the “Campaign Builder” tab to create your PPC campaign:

First, set up ad group pricing:

Then, go to the “Ad Setup,” where you will write and create your ad details (each ad headline, text and destination URL). You can also populate the same ads to your other ad groups and make minor edits to differentiate them. These are all nice features and designed to help the user save time when creating PPC campaigns.

Once you are done, generate the output and you can upload it to Google, Yahoo or Bing directly.

This module streamlines all aspects of your PPC campaign building process, from keyword research, grouping and ad copy writing for all 3 search engines. What used to take hours, or even days, now can be done in just a few minutes.

iSpionage is a useful tool for search marketers looking to get competitive intelligence data to improve or optimize their campaigns. It will also shorten the time it takes to create campaigns, especially for keyword research and launching campaigns in the three major search engines.

By using it you, can spend more time developing a better PPC strategy that will save money and time, and increase ROI of your PPC campaigns. Anyone who is serious about PPC advertising needs to check out this tool.

Click here to learn more about iSpionage Keyword Research tool

How to find a profitable niche using iSpionage

First of all let’s look at the normal approach affiliates use to find a niche:

1. Find a potential offer to promote
2. Do market research for the product (basic keyword research, competitive analysis, etc)
3. Start a direct linking PPC campaign
4. If profitable, create your own landing page, and crank up the campaign.

Usually you need to repeat steps 1-3 several times until you find one a real potential offer to promote.
The challenge with this approach: You spend a lot of time, effort and money before you find a profitable product to promote.

iSpionage can help you avoid those time-wasting and money-flushing steps. Instead of beginning with a PPC campaign, iSpionage allows you to monitor and analyze your niche. This will save you the “discovery” cost associated with finding profitable niche. By the time you begin your direct-link PPC campaign, you will know exactly where to start to get the most return on your investment.

Here are the steps to assimilate iSpionage into your niche discovery process:

Step1: Create a project

For each potential offer, come up with one or two main keywords.
You can then use iSpionage to expand your keywords further. At the time of this writing, “Acai berry” is one of the hot niches, making it a great example to illustrate the power of iSpionage.

Step 2: Analyze the result

iSpionage will start gathering data as soon as you enter keywords and hit the “Submit” button. You’ll start seeing the result after 24 hrs. I recommend that you to wait for several days in order to have the most meaningful data. (The trend over at least a week will give you a more accurate picture of the niche than data from one day.)

I’ve already monitored these keywords for 20 days, so we can draw some useful conclusions from this data.

For now, our objective is to find out if there’s a profitable affiliate in this niche. And if there is, we want to learn from this person.

From the picture below, we see that there is an affiliate in this niche (see picture).

Let’s drill down further.

On the page below, you’ll see who the dominant players are for this particular keyword. We get this information by looking at the Competitive Score. ) We’ll discuss how the competitive score is derived later.

The bottom line: The higher the Competitive Score, the more dominant the advertiser is. The reason this is an important factor is because we want to learn from the “Alpha dog,” the ones that have been working hard to optimize their keywords, ad copy, and landing pages.

Even better, the top advertisers, top3acai.com and acaicomparison.com are affiliates sites!

How do we know those are affiliate sites? Because they’re comparison and review sites, and 99.99% of the comparison/review sites are run by affiliates.

OK, let’s zoom in even more. I want to thoroughly analyze what they’re doing and how they’re doing it to get the most information I can from their campaigns in order to help my campaign.

With iSpionage you can put each of the top ranking sites on one screen, and compare them side by side…. Well, more like top to bottom. You’ll be able to see the ads that these advertisers are using in Google, Yahoo and MSN, their average rank, how long the ads have been running, the A/B ad split test copy, and snapshots of their landing pages.

Let’s analyze top3acai.com.

This guy is good! I’m 99.9% certain that it is a profitable campaign!

How can I say that with such a conviction?

Take a closer look at all of the highlighted things.

First, take a look at the top red box #1. Over the 20 days that I monitored this keyword, Top3acai.com shows up in Google (Avg. ad position is 2), Yahoo (1.5) and MSN (4.6).

Savvy PPC advertisers usually advertise in all 3 search engines AFTER it’s proven to be profitable in Google. Yes, they usually start with Google, then, when they have found the profitable kw-ad copy- landing page combination, they propagate the campaign to Yahoo and MSN.

Now take a look at the second red box (#2); it says 20 of 20. This tells us that this particular ad copy has been used by Top3acai.com for as long as we monitored the “acai berry juice” keyword. If this ad copy is not profitable they would not have run the same copy for so long, would they? On top of that, take a look at the ad copy they use in Yahoo and MSN. Yep, it’s the exact same copy.

The evidence is pretty strong that this is a profitable kw-ad copy-Landing page combination. But hey, they could be complete newbies that don’t care about profitability.

Alright, let’s do the final analysis, the final sanity check. Now, take a look at the red arrows on page (#3).

The keyword that triggers this ad is “acai berry juice,” and the ad copy HAS the keyword “acai berry.” Furthermore, the landing page has the keyword “Acai” all over it.

Now if you’re the consumer who’s searching for that keyword, would you not click the ad? And when you landed on a page with the search term all over it, would you not want to engage even more? It’s all relevant information to what the user is looking for.

You see, the key to a successful PPC campaign is the continuity between the keyword, ad copy and landing page. Top3acai.com’s campaign fits these criteria.

Here is our evidence:

• They’ve run the same ad for 20 days
• They’ve already propagated the campaign to Yahoo and MSN
• They have a linear/continuous keyword-ad copy-landing campaign

It is safe to suggest that this campaign is profitable, and we should learn as much as we can from this person.

Let’s analyze the next high-performing site, Acaicomparison.com.

Let’s start with the same method.

See box #1.

The Google average rank is 3.4, there is no rank in Yahoo and the average rank is 8 in MSN for the 20 days we’ve been monitoring this keyword. Pretty good, seems like this site focuses on Google only (at least at the time this document was written).

In box #2, you see that they did an A/B split test, and it seems that they found a winner! The top ad copy has appeared 13 times and the last appearance was on 12/2/08 while the bottom one was used only once, with the last appearance on 11/26/08. Good for them and good for you, too. Now that you have used iSpionage to review other sites and their activities, you have a winning ad copy to use as your base!

Let’s take a closer look at their overall strategy (box #3) and do the final sanity check. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes. You’re searching for “acai berry juice.” You see

I don’t know about you, but if I’m searching for an item and suddenly there’s a warning about the item that I’m looking for, the ad sure gets my attention.

This is a good ad. They use the negative ad psychology as the attention getter.

Now, when you click the ad and land on their site, what do you see other than the keyword you’re searching for? The logos for MSN, CBS, ABC, CNN. This gives them instant authority (authority by association), which is another great tactic.

With that, I conclude that this is another profitable campaign. It seems to be working fine for them because they’ve been running it for, at least, the past 20 days.

Great! You now have working model of landing pages and ad copies that you can adopt as your base.

Do you think you can start a profitable campaign with this information? Yes!

Now, imagine if you had this kind of information before entering any niche, or starting any PPC campaign!

With iSpionage, you won’t fly blindly. You’ll get actionable intelligence that you can assimilate into your campaigns right away.

Click here to learn more about iSpionage Keyword Research tool