Keyword Spy Review

Value
Features
Depth
Freshness
Usability
Overall
Rating: 3.1/5 (1 vote cast)

Functionality

Utility

Keyword Spy offers multiple tool-sets as a part of their membership options. We are going to review all of the tools they offer so you can decide which pricing option works best for your needs.

There are 2 core elements to your Keyword Spy membership; the Research section and the Tracking Section.

In the Research section you can search for information by typing in a domain, a keyword, a destination URL, or a piece of ad copy. The Research piece of the membership offers:

Domain, keyword, destination URL, and ad copy research
Top keyword and domain lists for organic and paid metrics
Data on top affiliates and affiliate products from 70 affiliate networks
Deeper reports on 8 of the top affiliate networks, their top products, and their top affiliates
A Firefox plugin for SEO and PPC research
An API for enterprise-level research

The Tracking portion covers:

PPC Competitive Research (keyword, ad, and landing page data)
PPC Data from Google, Bing, and Yahoo! paid search
PPC Data from over 30 countries
Historical Ads of competitors
PPC Keyword overlap between multiple sites
PPC Alerts off of updates to competitors campaigns
Organic competitor tracking in Google, Yahoo!, and Bing
Benchmarking of organic rankings between competitors
Organic keyword overlap

The Research and Tracking sections cover PPC and Organic search data in the following countries (all available in Google and only some available for Yahoo! and Bing):

United States
United Kingdom
Canada
Australia
Ireland
South Africa
France
Germany
Italy
Brazil
China
India
Japan
Mexico
Netherlands
Spain
Singapore
Denmark
Finland
Norway
Sweden
Switzerland
New Zealand
Poland
Malaysia
Austria
Greece
Philippines
Argentina
Belgium
Chile
Russia
Turkey
Romania
Portugal
Hungary
Bulgaria

Unique Features

Affiliate Reports and Affiliate Intelligence

A unique feature to Keyword Spy is their Affiliate modules. There are 2 parts to their Affiliate options:

Affiliate Intelligence
Affiliate Research

Affiliate Intelligence is an overview of all the networks, products, and ads which Keyword Spy purports to have data on. In this section you will see:

Graphical charts representing the biggest networks (by ad count)
A listing of the 70 networks Keyword Spy has access to
Total products and total ads for each network
The ability to click through on the network, the products, or the ads to get more detailed information about each via the Research section

The Affiliate Reports section lets you access top products and top affiliates for 8 of the 70 networks which Keyword Spy has data on. The networks represented here are:

Clickbank
Commission Junction
LinkShare
PayDotCom
ClixGalore
ShareASale
MAXBounty
Trade Doubler

Inside of this section you can see an overview of top products and top affiliates for the selected network, change to view different networks, and look directly at product or affiliate detail on the selected network.

Keyword Spy provides the following capabilities inside of their unique affiliate research section:

Ability to see just the affiliate PPC ads(ad copy, the keyword being bid on, the affiliate link) for products in any of their affiliate networks (looking at affiliates promoting a specific product, like Garmin GPS for example)
For affiliate networks in the Affiliate Reports section (see above) you can search by product as well as by an affiliate ID and see all the keywords (and products) being pursued by a specific affiliate or for a specific product

Tracking Features

Another unique feature available to you is the ability to track your own keywords against your competition, real-time, both organically and in paid search.

Other tools offer the ability to compare your site against another site, organically and in PPC, but Keyword Spy offers daily checks on your keywords with real-time comparisons against the competition in paid and organic search results, in Google, Yahoo!, and Bing.

The unique features in the Tracking module include:

Top competitors and their percentage of keyword coverage in Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. Along with their average position across your entire keyword basket
A keyword suggestion module which recommends keywords not already in your campaign and shows the average CPC and estimated clicks per day for a top ranking ad
Alerts for new competitors entering your ad and/or organic space as well as new keywords that currently tracked competitors are starting to bid on and rank for

Top Lists

Another unique feature of this tool is the various types of Top Lists it provides. You’ll have access to the following lists:

Top Paid Ad Spenders
Top Ad Spenders Based on # of Keywords
Top Organic Sites Based on # of Keywords
Ad Spenders with Most Budget Change
Ad Spenders with Largest Change in # of Keywords
Organic Sites with Largest Change in # of Keywords
Keywords with Highest CPC
Keywords with Highest Cost Per Day
Keywords with Most Clicks Per Day
Keywords with Largest Cost per Click Change
Keywords with Largest Cost per Day Change
Keywords with Largest Clicks per Day Change

Usability

Keyword Spy has an easy to use online interface and generally returns results quickly. You can sort data with a filter of your choosing, based on the data points they offer (ROI, volume, affiliate ad presence, etc).

Data is exportable with a filter applied and you can export keywords into Excel, .csv, and PPC compatible (AdWords, Yahoo!, Bing) formats.

Screenshots

Review Video

Coming Soon

Data

Source

Keyword Spy scrapes data from Google, Yahoo!, and Bing’s organic and paid search results as well as via available api’s for data like search volume and cost per click. They also utilize a proprietary internal system to find related keywords and add metrics like ROI and first/last days seen.

Keyword Spy also pulls in data from around 70 different affiliate networks to show affiliate products, affiliate ads, and affiliate-specific information on keywords and products being targeted by a specific affiliate.

Size

Their database is over 120 million keywords and covers multiple search engines in different countries; according to a representative from Keyword Spy.

Freshness

Keyword Spy updates its database and results daily according to its website.

Usage Strategies

Tips & Ideas

Just about all competitive research tools give you the ability to find keywords you are ranking for, that you can push up with additional link building and, perhaps, additional content for related keywords as well as check out the keywords with the most referral traffic for a competition and their ranking profile.

Keyword Spy’s unique affiliate research features offer you the ability to reverse engineer a specific affiliate’s and/or a specific affiliate product’s promotion strategy, profitable keywords, and landing page strategy. If your stuck trying to figure out what to promote and how to promote it, this feature gives you insights that most other competitive research tools do not.

Inside of their Tracking module, you can get daily updates on your organic and paid search to compare your overall search engine saturation against your competition’s. You can also use this feature to figure out which competitors have the stronger strategies across different search engines; which you can research further and improve on in order to outrank them.

Keyword Spy also offers up paid ad titles and descriptions as well as organic listing data (title and meta descriptions). You can use the historical archive of this data to see which combinations might be most effective for your campaigns and keywords.

Their Top Lists give you thousands of highly successful domains to begin your research on. Typically, broader sites will not be as targeted and specific as your site is on the product you are selling. These lists provide you with the cream of the crop in terms of overall organic positioning, ppc ad spend, and so on.

Notes

Here are a few things to keep in mind when using Keyword Spy:

When you add your keywords to the Tracking module, consider that you are more or less giving your data to a competitive research tool 🙂
Many affiliates often cloak or mask their affiliate links so you may not get access to all the affiliate data you might initially expect from an affiliate research tool
Remember that many of their custom metrics (like ROI) are based off of their internal data manipulation. Try not to be overly-reliant on data that is extrapolated multiple times from scraped results in search engines
Use your filters wisely when exporting, Keyword Spy does limit your exportable results so make sure you are maximizing your exports by using filters
Volume, estimated clicks, and other organic/paid data points are scraped directly from search engines and we know that data is not always super-accurate. Keep this in mind when evaluating the data returned by this tool

Sign Up

Price

Keyword Spy has 3 levels of pricing:

Research $89.95 monthly – Access to Research module only (no Tracking and no Affiliate Intelligence)
Tracking $89.95 monthly – Tracking only (no access to Research or Affiliate Intelligence)
Professional $139.95 monthly – Access to Research, Tracking, and Affiliate modules)

They also offer Enterprise and Agency level pricing on a customized quote basis, with access to an API.

Free Trial

A free lifetime trial account is available which gives you limited access to the Research module and the Affiliate module. Your export limit and query limits are restricted and you generally only see the 10 or 15 keywords when using either module.

Discounts & Coupons

The current coupon code is SEoyBswMJ. Additional reliable Keyword Spy coupons can be found at RetailMeNot.Com (retailmenot.com/view/keywordspy.com) and typically run at 20% off for the first month.

Rating: 5.5/10 (2 votes cast)

Rating: +1 (from 1 vote)

Keyword Spy Review, 5.5 out of 10 based on 2 ratings