Spy on Your PPC Competition with PPC Bully
November 7, 2008 Posted by Tyler CruzThe following is a paid review and is completely of my own opinion and is not influenced by being paid. If you’re interested in having me review your site or product, please view my advertising page.
ThePPCBully.com is a subscription-based service for AdWords advertisers that analyzes and tracks your competitor’s campaigns and advertisements. The main reason why PPC marketing can be very difficult is because of the stiff competition from other advertisers. PPCBully attempts to give you an advantage by tracking every detail of your competitor’s ads.
The system behind PPCBully is actually pretty basic in nature, but is a huge time saver. Basically, PPCBully queries Google based on various keywords that you list in a project, and tracks and logs all of the relevant ads that are displayed via AdWords. It will grab the ad creative, landing page URL, detect how often each ad is displayed, calculate the average position of each ad, and even detect what affiliate program each ad is using (if any). All of this data is then logged for your analysis.
While PPCBully repeatedly states and insinuates on it’s site that it reveals what the profitable ads are, there is no way anyone can ever really know this. It uses the logic that ads that are repeatedly shown and are displayed for long periods of time are profitable, but of course this logic is easily flawed.
However, that does not make PPCBully worthless. It simply makes their claim that it will tell you what ads are profitable misleading. Instead, I find the value in PPCBully to be it’s automated data gathering and mining. If used smartly, PPCBully can give you an edge of your competition by being able to keep a close eye on their movements. You can see if they’re moving up in position on average, stop bidding on certain keywords but increase their position on others, etc.
PPCBully can also be useful in checking out the competition in a possible niche you’re interested in entering before actually spending money to test it yourself. While you could do this by hand, PPCBully can give you much more accurate data as it will mine the results over time and basically give you a larger and accurate sample set of data as a result.
In the end, for me at least, PPCBully is a time saver. It doesn’t do anything you couldn’t do yourself, but do you really want to be checking all of your competitor’s ads for hundreds of keywords and niches every day, or even every hour?
Below is a comprehensive screencast review of PPCBully in which I show you a live working account and how it works exactly:
PPCBully uses what they call PI, or Profitability-Indictor, as a gauge to determine what ads are profitable. They use the following formula to determine the PI:
Ad PI = (Number of Days Seen * Percentage Seen) / Number of Days since Last Seen
Example:
Ad "Birthday Flowers" was seen 12 days out of 18. The Ad was last seen 2 days ago.
- Number of Days Seen: 12 days
- Percentage Seen: 12/18 = 66.6%
- Number of Days since Last Seen: 2 days
- P-Index = (12 * 66.6%) / 2 = 4
Profitable Ad is an ad whose PI is at least 7. You can change this default threshold (7) in the Account page.
The Price
PPCBully costs a monthly price of $49 but has a 60-day money back guarantee so you really have nothing to lose for trying it out.
20 Responses to “Spy on Your PPC Competition with PPC Bully”
So many tools available…you never know which ones to try, or if they’re worth paying money for.
I’m currently looking to buy Keyword Elite.
Well Keyword Elite is a completely different tool, it’s a keyword generation tool.
Keyword Elite, EfficientPPC/SpeedPPC, and PPC Bully are 3 completely different tools that do completely different things, for example.
But I agree that there is certainly no shortage of tools out there!
Getting affiliate program and creative would be invaluable. Not only to copy, but to generate own campaigns in other niches also. Learning what makes good placement and copy. Knowing what is working for someone else would be worth studying.
How long to keep PPBBully at $50/month would be a question, as it doesn’t easily figure into ROI.
I have looked this over and it seems like a nice tool but something that could make you waste more time in researching than doing. Plus it’s another monthly fee that you have to keep track of. If you were doing PPC full time I can see this being a useful tool to see ads and how often they are shown.
Another paid review? 😛
But I never heard of this so I might look into this on my road back into AM.
Jay
lol,
Tyler, did you know that this is an affiliate’s site? ThePPCBully.com frames the URL, http://jkensei.ppcbully.hop.clickbank.net/?gcode=1053086411, and then directs PPCBully.com.
Very, very smart affiliate marketer…
Oops, now it all makes sense… hmm wanting me to link to theppcbully.com instead of ppcbully.com as well as a few other things… can’t believe I was fooled!
Fortunately it doesn’t appear to hurt anything, although I’ll let the real owners know just in case.
I contacted the owners and they’re fine with it… in fact they’re quite happy, heh 🙂
Shouldn’t matter, who ever paid for the review should get the credit for the sales, right?
It doesn’t matter to me, but I thought it was cleverly disguised and quite interesting.
Yeah, I didn’t even notice. But this was something I was going to do, buy reviews on sites and use my aff link.
I’ve been looking to get more into PPC and the number of tools promising almost magical shortcuts to success are dizzying.
Now I am confused which one to choose.
ppccoach, ppcbully or ppc coaching by superaffiliatemindset ?
paid reviews run this site
I’m using Keyword Elite and SpeedPPC myself.
But the reviews for PPC Bully seems good. Shall give it a try.
[…] Spy on Your PPC Competition with PPC Bully […]
to to to today junior
It’s worth a try, I’m no really sure how well it works and how can this piece of software actually optimize our Adwords campaigns.
yeah.. looks really like its worth a try.. will giv it a shot.. n wil let u ppl know soon whether it really is!
Nice post! I’d like to wait for you next post.