Are you a Google AdWords advertiser? Do you wonder about what your competitors are bidding on, and where they're making money? SpyFu is a popular keyword tool for monitoring your competitors' bidding strategies on AdWords. The most popular feature of the service is the ability to triangulate on multiple competitors and see which keywords they are bidding on and you are not, thereby identifying keyword opportunities you may be missing out on. You can also see which keywords any individual competitor has been most successful with over time, as well as the reverse, seeing which keywords a competitor has tried but failed with.

Friends & family link: Get a free trial of SpyFu Premium

SpyFu's free service

You can sign up as a free member on SpyFu, and you'll get access to:

View the top 10 SEM keywords for a given competitor
View the top 10 SEO / organic keywords for a given competitor
View the top 20 SEM competitors bidding on a given keyword
View the top 20 SEO / organic competitors for a given keyword
Compare up to 2 websites' keyword overlap / differences (view up to 5 keywords)

SpyFu's free service is a good way to sample the site and get a feel for how it works.

SpyFu's full subscription service

What do you get for subscribing to the full version of SpyFu?

View all the SEM keywords for a given competitor
View all the SEO / organic keywords for a given competitor
View the top 1000 SEM competitors bidding on a given keyword
View the top 1000 SEO / organic competitors for a given keyword
Compare up to 3 websites' keyword overlap / differences (view unlimited keywords)

See a complete list of SpyFu's features

Comparing 3 websites is the real big benefit of subscribing. Most of us have two main competitors we worry about the most, and being able to triangulate between yourself and the other two guys and see what keywords you're missing is a real advantage (that hopefully the other guys don't know about yet). (It's useful to note that most other keyword spy tools only allow you to view single competitors or at most two) SpyFu's Full service also allows you to view low-performing keywords for each competitor, so you can learn from your competitor's mistakes. But perhaps most useful is that you can view your competitors' keyword bidding history over multiple years. so you can see which are the tried-and-true keywords which have been profitable over time.

SpyFu's Full service also allows you to view rank changes among SEM keywords - so you can see who is moving up the rankings for a given keyword. This is a good way to monitor for opportunities and threats in your campaigns.

You can also conduct advanced keyword searches in SpyFu Full. This is useful since it allows you to search for any combination of keywords (say "travel" and "vegas"), filter by average CPC (say "between $1.00 and $3.00"), then filter by number of clicks per day and number of advertisers bidding on those keywords. You can identify niches and keyword combinations that your competitors are missing and fly under the radar screen with customized niche campaigns.

Another nice feature with SpyFu Full is the ability to create keyword campaigns quickly and export the results into AdWords. You can use SpyFu's customized search and filtering tools to create your target keyword list and target bidding prices and then paste it straight into AdWords (or Excel).

How much does it cost?

SpyFu Full costs $69.95 per month. If you uncover one good keyword opportunity with the tool per month, you will likely make up the cost. Larger advertisers will probably have a larger net gain. SpyFu was also offering a 46% discount if you subscribe to an annual subscription at $469.95 per year.

See if SpyFu is still offering their 46% annual subscription discount (you'll need to click to the sign up page)
Learn more about SpyFu

Source: http://www.spyfu.com