Keyword Tool Reviews For Search Marketer

Advantages to using iSpionage:

1. For competitor keyword research, iSpionage gets keywords from all three major search engines while KeywordSpy and Spyfu only monitors Google. There are opportunities in Yahoo and MSN so leaving them out could potentially be a loss of opportunity.

2. For keyword tracking. iSpionage monitors user’s keywords in Google, Yahoo and MSN on daily basis. This allows you to find who the real player in this niche, and learn from them.

Affiliates use this to find profitable offer, the keywords and ad-copy associated with the offer. In house PPC manager uses this to monitor their competitor’s strategy.

3.  Now, the biggest advantage iSpionage has over its rivals is the keyword generation and campaign builder features which Keywordspy and Spyfu do not offer.  You can use the keyword generation tool to generate highly targeted keywords for your campaign or product niche. Each keyword generated has the average monthly search volume on Google.

4. The next cool feature is the campaign builder which allows you to build a PPC campaign for upload to Google adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN Adcenter easily. The campaign builder allows you to filter unwanted keywords, separate them into ad groups and price the keywords independently by match type as well. The last step is to write ad copies for your PPC campaign and iSpionage will even help you with that by displaying actual ad copies across the three major search engines when you click on the keyword for your campaign.

4. As you can see, iSpionage is the only complete web based end to end solution for your PPC marketing from keyword research, clean up/ad grouping, adcopy writing and launching of your campaign on a single platform.

5. Customer support. iSpionage has excellent live phone and email support. As part of the test, I called them, and they actually picked up the phone and invited me to the webinar where they walked me through on how to best use the tool. This is not the case for Spyfu and Keywordspy.

KeywordSpy and SpyFu has alot of similarities. The big difference between them is that KeywordSpy looks much prettier than SpyFu.

KeywordSpy features:

1. Competitor keyword research based on keywords or URL (Both iSpionage and SpyFu have it as well). They have a good size data, but the data quality is in question. For example, they have this column called ROI (as shown in the pict. below), we can’t figure out how did they get such information without even knowing one’s ad spend and profit margin. ROI of one advertiser will be  different than others.

Overall,  it’s still a good resource to get keyword ideas for your PPC and SEO campaign.

2. Affiliate research. User can search the keywords that an affiliate uses. The supported affiliate network: Clickbank, CJ, LinkShare, PayDotCom, ClixGalore, ShareASale, MAXBounty, TradeDoubler, Amazon.  The concept of this feature is interesting, BUT the problem is this : it’s nearly impossible to know which affiliates are the “super” affiliate that you want to follow and get their keyword from. It makes this feature pretty much useless, although they look pretty.

3.  Keyword Tracking (version 2). Keywordspy just recently launched this service and the interface is very similar to iSpionage. So if Keywordspy changed their own look and feel (version 1) to be very similar with iSpionage, it tells you a lot about the quality of iSpionage’s keyword tracking capabilities. I recommend to go with iSpionage for this feature.

4. Support: Email support only. Emailed them once, they got back within 3 days. By the time they got back to me, I’ve figured the solution out myself.

SpyFu.com is one of the first “spy tool” for search marketer. Their previous name was GoogSpy.com way back then.

Features:

1. Competitor keyword research based on keywords or URL (Both iSpionage and KeywordSpy have it as well). The user interface and data organization are not so great. They dumped the result on one screen, which can be overwhelming.

2. SpyFu Kombat. This tool allows user to see which keywords overlaps with their competitors in graphical manner. Even though it’s great, nice to know, but it’s not really actionable. If you have 200 keywords overlap with your competitors, so what ? If you want to know their keywords, you can just type in your competitors url on feature #1.

4. KeywordSmartSearch. This is a pretty cool feature. It allows you to do keyword research for up to 10 keywords simultenaously, then it provides you a filter based on your criteria to narrow down the your keyword list.

3. Unlike iSpionage and KeywordSpy, SpyFu doesn’t have keyword tracking/monitoring service. Which means their data are based on just one day of the month snapshot (the day they scrape the result), i.e: User won’t be able to see if the competitors are running A/B split testing, which keyword-adcopy combination works best for their competitors, which keywords the competitor are no longer running, etc.

4. Tech Support:  Email and phone # is provided, but response time is pretty lame.

SpyFu was built as a showcase of its parent company velocityscape.com, a web scrapping company.  So, SpyFu’s inftrastructure and architecture was never really built for search marketers. That’s why its data quality is the worst compared to iSpionage and KeywordSpy.