Hi everyone,

Last week I talked about PPC Web Spy. I suggested downloading the free version.

Some people have pointed out that it might not be all it’s cracked up to be.

I want to share that with you.  Grizz an internet marketer who is in the make money online niche. He downloaded the software and apparently like me paid for the upgrade and tried to sell a few copies.

Here is Grizz’s blog post.

He brings up a few good points. And I think you could benefit from reading them. Warning: Grizz’s blog is horribly ugly and has tons of PPC ads and crap on it.  You can’t even SEE the blog post until you scroll down at least one screen. BUT the guy makes a lot of sense.  Ignore the ugly blog for now and read his post. It’s worth checking out.

Primarily I purchased the product because I saw a few good referrals, one from someone I trust who doesn’t promote a lot of stuff.  Secondly I purchased the product because although the sales pitch sounded too good to be true I had to try it out. If I could really spy on what keywords other people were buying I’d be ecstatic. For example there are people who actually buy PPC ads on my name! “Ben Fitts” and “Benjamin Fitts” both have people in the MLM niche buying ads on my name.  I’d love to see what other keywords they were buying, how much they might be paying, etc.

Like Grizz I’ve been a bit concerned that the data doesn’t seem to be accurate.  Grizz and some other readers of his blog say that they thinks the data is basically just Google data not advertiser specific and similar to Brad Callen’s other product “SEO Elite”.

One of the biggest concerns they bring up that I’ve also noticed is let’s say I look up “buy perfume at Sephora” you’d expect that to be one of the top keywords that shows up when you look at the advertisers.  Instead you see a bunch of other generic keywords for “perfume” or “4711 cologne” or whatever. You don’t necessarily see the keyword you were doing research on! (they show 50 keywords in the free version and 100 in the paid version.)

That’s a big concern.  That’s one reason why they are suggesting that the tool really doesn’t know what keywords a specific advertiser is bidding on.  Certainly it doesn’t know any real data. They might even have some results that say this advertiser bids on thousands of terms but we don’t get to see that, and I can’t necessarily find the keyword I wanted to see.

Then there’s another issue.  My dad’s site for example.  My dad is one of the only certified Granicrete installers in Connecticut and Rhode Island.  So I put together a web site and bought some PPC ads targetted to Rhode Island and Connecticut.  According the PPC Web Spy this advertiser is brand new.  They can’t see the ads for him so they have no data.  Maybe that’s because they are doing their data mining somewhere else where our PPC ads don’t appear?  I dunno but it certainly makes the tool less valid because it won’t have local advertisers PPC terms.

Having said all that… I’d like to change my recommendation on PPC Web Spy to a wait and see.  Wait and see how the tool improves. I’d be very curious to see if Brad Callen releases some updates or something or whether or not he just goes to the bank and cashes his checks. We’ll see.

For now I’m even considering turing the plugin off.  I’m not real happy with the results I can see of other people’s keywords so it really isn’t doing much good for me.

- Ben Fitts

MLM Training > Home Business Blogs > PPC Web Spy – Update from others