As a PPC Coach member, you know that three important aspects of a successful PPC campaign are: finding the right product to promote, figuring out which keywords are profitable, and coming up with compelling ad copy to increase your click-thru-rates. Doing this research yourself can take some time, but fortunately there are several PPC Spy Tools available today that allow you to do this. A few of the most popular ones I’ve tried include PPC Bully, iSpionage and PPC Kahuna. They each have their strengths, but the downside is that they can be kind of expensive, ranging from $50 to $79 a month. If you are just starting out with PPC, you may want to try using a free tool instead, and in this post I am going to share with you a little case study I did and show you how to use the PPC analysis functionality in Traffic Travis to spy on your competitor’s pay per click campaigns.

How PPC Spy Tools Work

All the ad spy tools I’ve tried use the same basic premise. If an advertiser is displaying an Ad for a particular keyword consistently over a number of days, then they are likely making a profit with it. This makes sense. Unless you are a huge company, you probably wouldn’t be wasting money bidding on keywords that aren’t making you any money. So what these ppc spy tools will do, is scan the search engines for a particular set of keywords and record which ads were showing for each keyword. After collecting this data for a week or two (the longer the better), you should be able to pin-point which advertisers are doing well for which keywords.

PPC Spying with Traffic Travis

First download and install Traffic Travis. You will need to register your copy, but it is completely free. Lets say we are interested in promoting a product for learning to play the guitar. The first thing you will need to do is gather a big list of related keywords. I won’t go into detail here, you can just use your favorite keyword tool. For this example, I just used Market Samurai to get some keywords related to the phrase learn guitar. Feel free to use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool or even the Traffic Travis’ Keyword Finder as well. In this case study, I am using a small list of 15 keywords, but you should see much better results with a larger keyword list.

Now, we need to create a project, so go to PPC Analysis and click “Add Project”. Type in a project name and in the keywords tab, you can copy and paste in your list of keywords. The first tab in the tool is called Keyword/Details and this is where you can start your scan. Traffic Travis has a built in scheduler for automatic scanning, but you can just press ‘Start update’ to perform a manual scan. I normally just stick with manual scanning because I personally find it inconvenient to keep Traffic Travis open during a certain time. You will normally want to run your scans for at least a week to get any meaningful results, but the more data you collect the better.

Traffic Travis Keyword Details

During a scan, Traffic Travis will go out to Google and find the ads shown on the first page of the results for each keyword in your list, and the results are shown in the table below. The most interesting column here is Ads Found. If a keyword has little or no advertisers, you can probably conclude that the keyword is not profitable. Especially in a niche that has a lot of affiliates like this one. As you can see here, the two keywords related to guitar tabs have 0 and 1 advertisers so it is reasonable to conclude that people looking to play guitar tabs aren’t likely to be looking to buy something. The other keywords have a decent number of advertisers, so we should investigate further with them.

Finding the Top Sites in your Niche

The Top Sites For Keywords tab of Traffic Travis lets us see who are top competitors are. Click the ‘Fetch Sites’ button and you will be asked to select a day to analyze. You will then get back a list of sites along with the total number of times the site was found, and the site’s rank. As I understand it, rank is a number that combines how often the site was found with what position their ads are in. If you click on a particular domain, you can also see exactly which keywords a site is showing ads for and where the ad ranks.

Traffic Travis Top Sites

This is really valuable info. If you look at my results, you can see the top sites in my results are Musiciansinfo.org, Jamplay.com, and Reviewsnest.net. If you check out each of the sites, you will notice that MusiciansInfo and ReviewsNest are both review type sites, while Jamplay is a direct merchant site. These two review sites are obviously quite successful with high quality scores as their ads consistantly show up quite high in the results for many of my keywords. Digging down further and analyzing these sites, I can see exactly what products they are promoting. In this example, I can quickly determine that the Learn And Master Guitar Course and the Jamorama course are two good products to promote in my niche.

One other thing you can notice here, are the direct-linking Clickbank affiliates. They are easily recognizable by the hop.clickbank.net urls you see in the list of domains. Here, if I scroll through my entire list of sites, I can see that there are 7 different affiliates promoting 4 different guitar playing products. For testing purposes, I may want to try direct linking myself to see if I can make some profits, before taking the time to build my own review site.

Finding the Profitable Keywords And Ad Copy

I don’t find the Most popular keywords tab all that useful, so lets skip right over to the Websites keyword list tab. Click on “Fetch Domains” and you will first be prompted to specify a date range. On the left, you will see a list of domains along with the number of matches. This is just the number of times an ad has been found for this site during the specified time range. If you click on a site, you will see all the keywords that site is advertising on. If you click on a specific keyword, you will also see in the bottom table when the keyword was last scanned along with its Ad Rank.

Traffic Travis Site Keywords

Going back to my results for MusiciansInfo, we can see that he is consistently showing ads 100% of the time for several keywords. If we drill down to the learn guitar fast keyword, we can also see that his ads are consistently showing in positions 2-4. That’s where you normally want to be, so I am going to conclude that this person is making a profit with this keyword.

Once we’ve determined that a site is doing well promoting certain keywords, we also want to examine the ad copy they are using. If you click on a particular check date, you can see the ad that was displayed at the time. Continuing with my example, I looked through all the ads that MusiciansInfo was using and it turns out that he is only using a single ad for multiple keywords. So again I’m going to conclude that the ad copy he’s using is pretty effective. When I decide to create my own ads, I’m going to want to make sure I create at least one ad that is similar to his to split test with.

As you can see, Traffic Travis is very powerful PPC spy tool. After running it for a long enough period of time, I can see who the successful affiliates are in my niche, what type of site they are using (review site, direct-link, etc), and have a good idea of what keywords and ad copy are working well for them. This is very important stuff and combined with other free pay per click tools, will save you quite a bit of time and money yourself when you try to create your own profitable PPC campaigns.

How Can I Take This to the Next Level?

Traffic Travis is free, and works quite well. If you are a beginning PPC marketer, then you should definitely add it to your PPC toolbox. However, the software does have some limitations. First, it only runs on Windows so any Mac or Linux users are out of luck. Second, it doesn’t work as well when you are trying to monitor several hundred keywords at once. It’s interface just doesn’t make that easy to do.

If you are a more advanced PPC marketer who runs several PPC campaigns simultaneously, then I would seriously recommend taking a look at PPC Bully. It’s web based, so it works on all platforms and you don’t have to remember to keep it open to perform your scans. Plus, I find the interface a bit easier to use compared with Traffic Travis, especially with lots of keywords and multiple campaigns. It’s gotten good reviews from many PPC Coach members, so I would definitely check out the 60 day free trial.

I am also very interested in the new PPC Bully 2.0 that’s launching on June 9th. The new version of PPC Bully has a searchable database of already scanned keywords, so instead of waiting 2 weeks for your data, you have it there instantly. What makes it great is that you don’t need to do any keyword research anymore. Instead you can search by an affiliate product and PPC Bully 2 will automatically find the profitable keywords and ads for it. Take a look at the pre-launch videos and read the free copy of the PPC Bully Blueprint to see what it is all about. It looks quite powerful with loads of potential.

Download the Free Version of Traffic Travis

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To be successful with PPC Coach, you’re going to need to join some quality affiliate networks and one of my favorites is Hydra Network. What makes Hydra Network different from every other CPA network out there? Well first of all, it’s not running off DirectTrack like most other CPA Networks. Hydra has its own proprietary real-time campaign tracking which is known for its accuracy and reliability. It also has tons of exclusive offers that you won’t see on other networks. This includes plenty of email and zip submit offers which makes Hydra Network a great network for starting out with the PPC Coach poll method.

When you first login to your Hydra account, you will see a snapshot of your monthly and year to date revenues on the left hand side of the page. One thing I wish they would add is a link to your current day’s earnings on the front page. In the middle of the page, you can see the latest offers that have been added to the network. Hydra is one of the biggest CPA networks out there, and they’re usually adding several offers a day, many of which are exclusive. At the time of this review, they have over 360 exclusive offers which is huge.

Clicking through to a specific offer, the allowed types of promotion are clearly specified in the description. Also included in the description is what specific action needs to be taken for you to get credit for a lead. Getting your affiliate tracking url is straight-forward and the interface easily allows you to add your own subid. If you want to see what an offer looks like, you can do so by clicking on the ‘Test Click’ link and the offer landing page will open up in a new window.

As mentioned above, Hydra offers real time stat tracking and your reports are accessible from the Reports tab. There are quick links to your Todays and Yesterdays earnings which is quite convenient. Reports can be easily exported to CSV for offline viewing. By checking the ‘Show Sub IDs’ and ‘Show Actions Only’ checkboxes you can filter your report to show only your conversions. I use this feature all the time to quickly upload and update my earnings in Prosper202.

For those of you who need a little incentive, Hydra also offers a nice little rewards program. Earn $5000 in a month, and you’ll win a $50 American Express gift card. If you’re a super affiliate and can earn more than $150k a month, you can bring home cool prizes like a Sharp 42 inch LCD TV, or an Apple Macbook Pro. I guess if you’re a super affiliate though, you can pretty easily afford to buy yourself these toys anyways. Hydra’s referral program is one of the best in the business at 5%.

I personally tend to rotate my advertising spending among a bunch of different CPA networks, but Hydra is one network I tend to naturally gravitate to. By jumping in on the recently added exclusive offers, it gives me a good chance to get started pumping out some profitable campaigns with very little competition. Hydra pays on a Net-15 basis and they offer both Paypal, wire and ACH payment options. ACH is great because your payments go directly to your bank account and you avoid any fees that Paypal charges. I’ve been with Hydra for several months now and they have always paid me on time and I’ve never had any problems with them. If you’re new to PPC Coach, I would highly recommend making Hydra network one of the first networks you join.

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