Finding your competitors PPC keywords?

Does anyone know a good tool for tracking your competition's PPC keywords? Free or low cost would be best, though I'd splash out for something that is really powerful and has good features.

Spyfu is good for this purposes and does it very well

http://www.spyfu.com/

Thanks man... just had a quick look, seems awesome. Will look into more depth.

Yup, go with spyfu. WELL worth the 80 bucks a month.

I don't see much benefit in looking at a competitors keywords - they might not necessarily be doing pay per click correctly themselves. Sometimes new advertisers will step into the space your advertising in and start blowing money left and right with poorly designed campaigns. You wouldn't necessarily want to imitate them. You can always look at Google's Keyword tool to see which are the highest competition keywords - the bids are high on them for a reason, they obviously convert well. You just need to find your sweet spot in the rankings for those terms. See what rate they covert at for you and back into a max CPC you're willing to pay based on your target CPA. For tail terms, I tend to focus on building a solid list of phrase match and broad match terms to capture all of that traffic. It's easier to make bid decisions on a few hundred broad/phrase match keywords, than to make any sense of several thousand exact match tail terms that each only have one click.

Kazi_Haque said:

Spyfu is good for this purposes and does it very well

Spyfu (sorry, had to remove the URL since I'm new here)

Click to expand...

Spyfu isn't very accurate at all. I've managed campaigns that were in the $750k - $1MM spend per month for my previous employer and I would sometimes do a search for us on there to see what it would come up with, wasn't even close. And the keywords they were showing were far from complete. Not to mention, it's not just about the keywords themselves, but how the overall account structure. There are many more moving parts with PPC.

Thanks for the feedback lads.

@ infierno: don't completely disagree with you, but this is for my employer.. we rely heavily on PPC at the moment cos website is fresh and young and I am the only one IMing there (arrived less than a month ago), with a LOT of work. I'm not a PPC veteran, though the guy I am working with is, we're trying to shift our traffic from PPC to organic but it takes time, and so need to gather more info on competition (which IMO is never a bad thing)

I use SEMRush, but same point - take every finding with a grain of salt. Nothing works better than "sneaking" up on your own campaigns and seeing if what they have there is correct... and you'll find that it's not. But it's a good tool to get an idea of what's happening. Is SpyFU better than SEM Rush, any experience??

SEMRush is like 60-70 per month, which is a lot.