Ad spying tools are essential tools for anyone who advertises on the search engines. They allow you to discover your competition and leverage all the research they have done and help your own pay per click campaign get off the ground. All the time that you might be spending on things like keyword research, split testing ad copy, and landing page design can now be used on other things. Why spend time doing all the work yourself, when you don’t have to?

There are numerous pay per click spying tools out there. Some are web based, while others are software programs that you download and run from your own system. All of them work using the same basic premise. Ads that appear at the top of the search results 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 your keywords on a daily basis. After collecting enough data (1-2 weeks), you should be able to quickly figure out which advertisers are doing the best and for which keywords. Once you have that info, you can examine their ad copy along with their landing page. As you can see, this knowledge can be very helpful for your own PPC campaign.

I’ve used many different ad spy tools myself, so let me share with you the advantages of each.

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

PPC Kahuna – This tool is one of the main selling points of the PPC Kahuna pay per click training membership. It is for Windows only 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]. The software gets updated quite often, so expect its capabilities to increase in the future.

Affiliate Espionage – This is a cool little tool that has a whole host of competitive intelligence features. It is also very affordable with a one time payment of $9.97. 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 Adcenter) 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 a central place, which makes it a little less convenient to find what you want than the first two tools.

Traffic Travis – This is a great tool that any affiliate marketer should have. It is a desktop software that you use on your own computer. What’s more is that the program is totally free! The PPC Analysis module of Traffic Travis is actually a very effective ad spy tool. I would recommend that you try it first as new pay per click marketer. It is limited to Adwords however, and it is not quite as easy to use as iSpionage or PPC Kahuna if you are tracking several campaigns at once.