iSpionage: Keyword Research and Competitive Analysis Tool

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Ann Smarty

11/9/09

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iSpionage is an advanced (paid) keyword research tool allowing for numerous keyword management and competitive analysis features many people (especially PPC marketers) will find useful:

(!) Generate keyword suggestions;
(!) Group and manage keyword lists;
(!) Research and monitor PPC competitors;
(!) Create ad groups;
(!) Export keyword lists and ad campaigns;
(!) More!

I found the tool useful enough to make a thorough feature overview:

Major Feature 1: Competitive Research

Start by adding a new project: provide your website URL and let the tool analyze the page content and retrieve base keywords. The tool will then fetch those base keywords and generate the list of suggestions based on Google’s API . Next to each suggested key phrase, see:

• The average monthly search volume,
• The search volume for the past month,
• The advertiser competition.

Select the words you want to further work on and add them to your new project:

After your project is created, you will be redirected to the PROJECTS folder where you can click your new project link and get access to lots of useful information:

Project Summary

Select the data type you want to be summarized: top advertisers ranked by impression share or top advertisers ranked by Ad Coverage and number of the words in the project.

Keywords

The table of your selected keywords contains:

• Average CPC for each key term;
• Average search volume;
• Google unique advertisers;
• Yahoo! unique advertisers;
• Bing unique advertisers;
• Latest ads.

Advertisers

The table contains the following data:

• Your competitor’s domain;
• Impression share (The impression share is estimated based on the advertiser’s ad coverage of each individual keyword, as well as the keyword search volume);
• Average ad coverage (The individual keywords ad coverage divided by the number of keywords that triggered the first page ads);
• Average ad position.

You can compare two or more advertisers. Select the competitors you want to compare and click “Compare” – the tool will compile a summing up table giving the following information for each competitor:

• Search engine the competitor advertises in;
• The number of words associated with the ad;
• The ad itself;
• The landing page;
• The latest position;
• When the ad was last seen;
• How many times the ad appears;
• The affiliate network:

You can add each competitor to the watch list to be alerted on new ads and new keywords the advertiser stats to bid on:

Related Keywords

For each key term you decided to manage, you can also find “related keywords” – a bit extended version of the base one. You can view each word stats (average search volume, Google, Yahoo and Bing ads).

You can add any word to your project ad export the table into a text or Excel file.

Major Feature 2: Keyword and Campaign Builder

While the previous feature set was all about the competitors, this toolkit is more about creating and organizing keyword campaigns.

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

Just select those phrases you are interested in and click Add Selected to “My Keyword Bag” (the option hides behind “Actions” link).

Clean Up Keyword Lists

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

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

After that you will be offered to save the list, create an ad group or build one-keyword-per-ad group campaign.

Group the Keywords

Start by giving a name to your campaign for further reference. Now 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 a descriptive name based on the grouping criteria: e.g. “3-word”, “no-stop words”, etc):

Create an Ad Campaign

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

• Name the project;
• Set the search engine;
• For each group specify the match type (broad, phrase, exact) and the maximum cost per click:

After that in the “Ad Setup” you should give your ads details (each ad headline, text and destination URL) and generate the output once you are done (export it to the text file or Excel).

Create Customized Alerts

“Alerts” option was one of my favorite ones. It allows to set up alerts on the project level (e.g. “Alert me when new advertisers that use the keywords from XX project appear in Google“) or more specific alerts (tracking the selected competitors).You are allowed to provide up to 6 email addresses to send alert copies to.

Pricing

The packages vary in features and rates: the minimum price is $19 per month while the most popular package costs $129 per month.

Our Verdict

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

Now, would you like to play with the tool?

SEJ is giving away 3 iSpionage professional accounts with free access for 3 months (one prize is thus $387 worth!) – to win one of them, just follow SEJ on Twitter and retweet:

Win free access to iSpionage kwd research tool: follow @sejournal and RT! http://kl.am/4JEB