I just received notification that SpyFu Kombat was launched today.
SpyFu Kombat is an add-on to the classic SpyFu online service by VelocityScape. For those who are not familiar with SpyFu at all, have a look at my article from 2006 where I described the features of the service in greater detail.
SpyFu is the commercial successor of the popular and free tool GoogSpy, which is not available anymore. SpyFu continues to offer some free information, but most data are only available to registered and paying customers.
In simple words, SpyFu is a competitive intelligence tool to evaluate and compare domains.
It shows for selected domains the top organic and paid search keywords, estimations about the ad spends and also allows reverse look-ups by starting off with the keyword or keyword phrase and the top sites ranking in the organic and paid results at Google to drill down further from there.
The new SpyFu Kombat tool allows a visual and direct comparison of up to three domain names. The amount of paid keyword spends or organic rankings are visualized as a round circles, which varies in size, depending on the domains amount of activity in PPC and rankings. It also shows the amount of keyword overlaps between the selected domains visually.
Timely to the selected does VelocityScape demonstrate the features of SpyFu Kombat using the current presidential election campaigns by Barack Obama and John McCain in the United States.
The tool shows nicely how the promotional campaigns of the two presidential candidates differ. While the Republican candidate John McCain is spending large amounts of money for many keywords in the Paid Search category, compared to his opponent Barack Obama at least, the results are reversed in the organic search category, with Barack Obama’s website BarackObama.com ranking for a much larger amount of keywords than his opponent’s website JohnMcCain.com.
You can also see the development and change of those activities over time in a nice line graph for all compared domains next to each other for direct visual comparison. A line-graph statistic is also available for the budget estimation.
If you click on one of the circles or the area where the circles overlap, you get a list of the actual keyword phrases (full account only). Then you can click on each keyword phrase for more details, which is not limited to the selected domains anymore though, but shows the activity for the selected keyword phrase overall. Maybe the option to switch between a filter by the selected domain and no filter would be useful in some cases.
"2008 election" is the number one keyword phrase where both candidates run PPC campaigns for, but none of the two shows up when I do a Google search for it. It shows in SpyFu that there are 20 advertisers bidding. It shows for me only 8 ads on the right side and no sponsored ads at the top of the results. Mhhh …
The SpyFu Kombat feature is part of the regular SpyFu service and fully accessible to all paying customers of the service. The results for non-paying users are limited to the graphical overviews, without the ability to drill down or see specific keyword phrases. The cost for the service is comparable to other similar CI services out there, like KeyCompete, Trellian Competitive Intelligence or Syntryx Search Marketers. The annual subscription is the best option for marketers who are doing CI on an ongoing basis. For marketers who only do this kind of stuff occasionally, lower cost short term (1 or 3 days) subscriptions are available.
SpyFu provides data for the US and UK market.
VelocityScape also offers a professional product called "Web Scraper Plus", which seems to be very powerful. It also gives me an idea about the source of the SpyFu data. I didn’t find anything on their website, so I had to make a guess.
SpyFu and SpyFu Kombat are certainly worth your time checking it out and play around with.
Cheers!
Carsten Cumbrowski
Internet Marketer, Entrepreneur and Independent Blogger
To find more resources to competitive intelligence and keyword research, check out the internet marketing resources portal at Cumbrowski.com.
