Brad Callen is an SEO guru and a PPC guru (as well as one of my heroes). He’s released a new product for Google AdWords. It plugs into Firefox as a plugin and allows you to do a few things.
It works any time you do a Google search, and it affects the “Sponsored links” results. One nice perk he’s put in is an option to show the destination URLs for the paid ads. Now not everyone realizes this, but every time you click on one of these ads, the person/company who placed that ad has to pay a certain amount. Hence the term “pay per click”. The option he put in lets you check out their pages without making the advertiser pay. This is just polite, but lets you learn from other marketers who may be bidding on your terms, when you can check their landing pages.
But the nice thing, the huge perk of this tool is a little “View Keywords” button underneath every ad. When you click this, it displays every keyword that that advertiser is bidding on. I’ll let that sink in a moment. Yes, every keyword – this means that you can see all keywords that any one advertiser is bidding on. You can use this information to add new keywords to your own PPC campaign, use those keywords to test out for conversions in a particular ad group. There’s a good chance the keywords that experienced advertisers are bidding on are converting keywords, and you can learn quickly from this.
Yes, it’s a little sneaky. You’re taking all the work that the other advertisers did to do their keyword research and learn what keywords convert, and you’re just jumping past all that work and getting a list of keywords. But it’s legit – and there’s nothing illegal about it.
Brad’s decided to go ahead and give this tool away. I’ll go ahead and forewarn you, he does do an upsell, but the basic functionality of the tool are all present in the free version. If you have Firefox and do any PPC at all (or just want to see what kind of things PPC advertisers are bidding on), it may be something you want to check out. The name of Brad’s new plugin is PPC Web Spy.
If you do check it out, let me know what you think, and if it gets you new conversions. I already got it myself, and I’ll definitely be using it to try advancing my own AdWords campaigns.