Ad spying tools are essential tools for any pay per click marketer. You can use them to see what your competition is doing, and take advantage of their pay per click research to help your own campaign. This allows you to save time and effort which can be applied to other things. Why spend time doing all the work yourself, when the hard work has already been done for you?

There are numerous pay per click spying tools out there. Some are are the web, while others are software programs that you download and run from your own computer. All of them work using the same basic premise. Ads that appear near the top of Google for example, over a number of days in a row are more than likely to be profitable for that advertiser. Otherwise, why would they spend money advertising for these top spots if they were losing money?

By using an ad spying tool, you can automatically keep track of what ads are being shown for specific keywords on a scheduled basis. After the tool has collected data for a long enough period of time (a couple of weeks), you should be able to quickly determine which advertisers are the most successful and for which keywords. Once you have that info, you can examine the ad copy they are using as well as their landing page. As you can see, this information can be very helpful for your own PPC campaign.

Lets take a look at some different Ad Spy Tools that I have used myself and see what they have to offer.

iSpionage – This is the most expensive tool of the group and will cost you about $75 a month to use. It does offer several advantages however. First, it is web-based so it works on both Mac or PC. It is also project based, so it is very easy to scan keywords from multiple markets at a time. Plus, not only does it support Google Adwords, but it also can scan competitors on Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN Adcenter.

PPCKahuna Software – This tool is one of the main selling points of the PPC Kahuna pay per click training membership. It is a windows desktop software and works on Google Adwords. It is relatively easy to use and quite powerful. The advantage that PPC Kahuna offers are its [excellent|great|nice] filtering capabilities [that help you easily find what you need|which helps pinpoint those profitable competitors extremely fast]. It is also updated very often, so expect it to be more powerful in future releases.

Affiliate Espionage – This is a neat little tool that not many people know about. It only costs $9.97 which is very affordable for what it can do. Since it is a Firefox extension, it works on all major platforms. Affiliate Espionage tracks the ads that it sees as you make searches. You can also input in your own keywords and have it scan during a certain time period. The extension supports the 3 major pay per click platforms (Adwords, Yahoo Adcenter and MSN) and it works by annotating the ads in your search results with useful data. The downside of this tool, is that all the information is not in one place, which makes it harder to find what you want than the previous two tools.

Traffic Travis – This is a handy tool that any internet marketer should have. It is a desktop application that you use on your own computer. What’s more is that the program is totally free! The Ad spy tool part of Traffic Travis is located in the PPC Analysis module. I would recommend that you try it first as new pay per click marketer. It only works with Adwords however, and it is not quite as easy to use as iSpionage or PPC Kahuna if you are working with several campaigns at once.