The Most Misused Tool In Pay Per Click
Spyfu… nifty gadget, valuable tool, but all too often misunderstood and misused. And this is all because they go where no tool has gone before (or should go) – they guesstimate ad spends. This is what countless business owners think they need in order to succeed. They are mistaken.
Don’t misunderstand what I’m saying – Spyfu is an excellent source of incredible insight into certain areas of pay per click and natural search. But time after time I see business owners and paid ad analysts make the same two mistakes with respect to Spyfu data.
The first mistake is that they misunderstand why they’re using a tool like this in the first place. I had one prospective client say “I have a list of all my competitors’ ads from SpyFu, I just need you to copy them into my campaign. That’s why I subscribe to SpyFu, isn’t it!” Wrong. There’s nothing in SpyFu that says these ads are any good, it just shows you the ads so you can see what’s out there. My other favorite is, “I have a list of all my competitors’ keywords – let’s put them in my campaign.” Why? What tells you those words are any good? Why would you want to simply copy what your competitors are doing, and what’s more, how can you possibly know if it’s working well for them?
What you absolutely don’t get from SpyFu, or any other “outsider” tool for that matter, is performance indicator detail. You can see a lot of really good information, but the only way for you to know whether a keyword or text ad actually performs well is to see the ad campaign performance metrics, which you will never have access to unless you have access to the paid ad account. And even then, you don’t know if these words and ads are profitable – heck, most retailers using PPC don’t keep enough track of their ad accounts to know themselves whether or not their keywords are profitable – how is someone outside the organization going to know that kind of detail?
The Overlooked Strength of 3rd Party PPC Ad Tools
Here’s what countless business owners and ppc analysts tend to forget – these tools let you see the entire market sector. Why is this useful? It’s not so you can copy what everyone else is doing. It’s so you can see the big picture and look for what’s missing. Imagine that you’re looking for a place to put up a billboard by flying over a city in a helicopter. You don’t put your billboard where everyone else’s billboards are – you look for that perfect intersection with traffic that has no billboard; the place that’s been overlooked by all the competition. The easiest way to find what you’re looking for is to view the whole landscape and locate the “missing” billboards.
The other benefit from competitive analysis is to see if your competitors are advertising in a market you have a valid claim to, but aren’t actively pursuing. I had one client who sold generators online. His main focus was selling to the Gulf coast during hurricane season and selling to the northeast during blizzard season. A competitive analysis showed that he was missing out on an entire market segment – generators for Recreational Vehicles. The Baby-boomers are retiring and hitting the road with a vengeance, but he was so busy focusing on reacting to natural disasters that he completely forgot that there are other reasons people need generators.
Finally, one of the overlooked functions of Spyfu in particular that I use is their paid keyword report that’s right in the middle of the page. Spyfu yourself and then think about what you’re looking at – this isn’t a literal keyword list. There’s no way you can gain access to that from a 3rd party tool. This is the list of searches that triggered your ads. You can dump that thing into a spreadsheet and get to work checking out all the searches that triggered your ads, and clean out those that shouldn’t be there. To me, this report is easier to use than Google’s query report. It’s not as comprehensive because Spyfu doesn’t collect information non-stop all the time, but it can set anyone in the right direction for building negative keywords lists and making sure queries match the ads.
Third party search and competitive tools can be a gold mine of information. Just remember what it is they are telling you, and don’t get it confused with key performance indicators. View the landscape then make your own advertising decisions.
Sorry, ouija has no special extra insight.
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Great points, I have used Spyfu many times for researching client’s competition however always find myself being asked “what is my competition spending?”. This is not what the tool is useful for as it does not give accurate spend estimates. I have found that it does provide great insight however to your competitor’s strategy which you highlight well. What keywords are they going after, what position and ad copy strategy are they using, and where are they landing people are all very useful to find possible areas of weakness. My favorite use of Spyfu is using the keyword list to see how smart the competitor’s strategy is. If they have a keyword list full of unqualified terms and high position, usually a sign that the account is not being managed well or professionally. In that case, I usually do not want to look to deeply into what they are doing because it is probably not smart. On the other end, if they are showing up for a majority of qualified traffic based on the keyword list and there is variation on positioning, probably an account that is managed on a consistent basis. Thus, I look to see which terms they are aggressive on, and use this as insight to which terms they probably convert on. Everyone uses this tool differently and always great to get some insights from others. Great post, thanks…
This post reminds me of a panel I saw at SXSW this year. It was about how to be a successful blogger, but the lessons apply to paid search as well. One of the speakers said that a lot of people approach blogging by wanting to be the next Ted Koppel, Michael Arrington, Cory Doctorow, etc. The problem is that we already have a Ted Koppel, Michael Arrington, and Cory Doctorow – we don’t need another one. To be a successful blogger, you need to be a true individual, and offer something to the world that no one else can. This applies to businesses that want to advertise online as well. Don’t just copy your competion – learn from what they’re NOT doing, and then go do that!