You won’t find any affiliate links for PPC bully in this post. Simply because I don’t bother. There are already tons of “reviews” out there on PPC Bully, and they’re all plugging it one way or another. Nothing wrong with that – but I just wanted to give my readers an honest opinion on this tool without them thinking “yawn….yet another blogger plugging PPC Bully”. At the start of this series, I mentioned that PPC Bully is one of the research tools that I use. I’m still using the original PPC Bully and not the current 2.0 version (frankly I’ve never seen it).

The guys behind this tool has received a healthy mix of both good and bad press. Some of it they deserve – some not so much. Let me get the negative out of the way first; When you’re a member of PPC Bully – you WILL get lots of what is basically spam from them. I understand that it’s a another way for the owners to earn extra income from their member base, but in my opinion they would gather a whole lot more respect from members (and non-members) if they stuck to sending out a quality newsletter with just useful tips and tutorials. Or at the very least – don’t insult the intelligence of their own marketer audience.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.Instead, their membership newsletter consists of several emails weekly (sometimes daily) like “HURRY… MUST SEE VIDEO…” , “LAST CHANCE FOR THIS ONCE IN A LIFETIME OPPORTUNITY to join the secret mega billionaire super marketing club”…. “You MUST see this free report NOW or else”… You get the drift. Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Basically – if you sign up for PPC Bully (which I still think you should, and I will tell you why shortly) be prepared for a bunch of annoying email spam. I just have Outlook filter it all to my junk folder though, lol.

Anyway… enough criticism aside. I DO find PPCBully useful. People have criticized it for being what it is – a competitor/niche spy tool. Critics argue that the data gathered by the tool isn’t useful for beating the competition or for basing new, winning campaigns upon. To some extent they are right. But they are also wrong. You see, it all comes down to HOW you use the data PPC Bully gives you. If your frame of mind works around just blindly duplicating what you see other people do and hope to turn a buck from it – the PPC Bully data isn’t gonna help you.

But using PPC Bully as part of your research, as a supplement to other methods and findings, is what makes the difference.

Sneaking in Line

Ok, so PPC Bully is a “competitor spy” tool. It’s main features focus on finding out the how’s and what’s of your competition’s ppc search campaigns. You give it a set of keywords, and leave it working over time. The longer you wait to gather data, the better the results. I leave mine running for at least a month before I check back on them.

Here are some of the things you can find out about other advertisers bidding on those keywords;

• The various ad copies they use
• The style, theme, and type of landing pages (and variations) they use
• The offers they are promoting, and how
• The ad positioning that seems to work best for them
• Their ad scheduling, revealing when their ads appear more often

That may not seem like much at first, but a closer look at all of these variables can give you a good head start in your campaign research. Especially if you’re testing out a new niche that you know little or nothing about. Questions will come to mind like “what type of landing page should I be developing for this niche?” and “what kinds of ads should I start out with?”.

Let’s break it up a little to see what PPC Bully can give you;

Ad Copy – Don’t Copy. Get Inspired.

The thing about ad copy in search is that it’s highly sensitive to the keywords you are targeting for that ad. First off, each keyword determines the mindset and persona you are trying to bring in with it. Secondly, the user seeing that ad will “expect” ads that their mind subconciously deems appealing. If you have loaded up PPC Bully with a good number of keywords that you intend on using, you will be able to now see what appears to be working for the competition.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

After all – that is what PPC Bully is all about: to find what appears to be working in a niche. And if you have gathered your data over a period of a month or more, chances are pretty good that the campaign is profitable for the advertiser. Those ads are still there for a reason! I’ve let some PPC Bully projects run for almost a year and over time seen competitors come and go from the niche. But then I also see clearly which ones remain. They MUST be doing something right. Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Here’s a tip:
Try grouping your keywords into themes and make separate projects in PPC Bully for them. One for buying-keywords, one for shopper/researcher-keywords, and one for general/broader keywords.

So back to the ads… You have collected some ads for each keyword that appear to be the “killer” ads. Now to the important part: DON’t just blatantly copy them! Doing this will only hurt yourself as it wouldn’t separate you from the competition – but rather blend in with the rest and lower your CTR.

Instead – try to observe WHAT defines these ads and understand WHY they are working in the first place.

• do they bring in keywords into the ad? (this is great in many cases, but less beneficial in others)
• are they using keyword insertion wisely and with relevance?
• do they use a certain tone of language, slang, jargon?
• do they use numbers dominantly in the title or description (or not at all?)
• do they use symbols or eye-catching text-formatting?
• do they use “vanity” destionation URLs with relevant terms in the domain or path? (or not?)
• are they focused on being curious, pushing a sale, pushing a benefit? Are they being specific about the product or not?

And last but not least – from all of the above it will be obvious whether or not your competition has done their homework. It often surprises me to see that in some fairly high competitive niches – advertisers aren’t doing all what they should be. Many ignore being relevant in their ad but rather re-use the same generic ads for each keyword. You will see this for even big budget, corporate advertisers.

You can (and will) use this to your advantage. Be more relevant! Be better at catching the attention away from the competing ads, and right to yours!

To compete with the remaining ads that are actually good – dare to be different. Borrow IDEAS from the best ads, and improve on them!

What Type of Landing Page Should I Use?

Let’s talk landing pages. You’ve seen the most prominent ads that your competitors have been using over time. Now we’ll take a look at what they’re sending their visitors to. Chances are, what they’re doing is working well and their landing pages have likely gone through some split-testing and optimization already. Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Let me stress again though that you can’t obviously trust this assumption 100%. Don’t go ripping off page ideas blindly. The idea here is to get a *vision* of what likely works and why.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

So anyway… start checking out some of the longest performing ads in your PPC Bully project. Visit their landing pages and start taking notes. I like to take screenshots of landing pages for reference (using the Screengrab! addon for Firefox). This way I can quickly look at them again whenever I want. You could also print them out on paper for side-by-side comparison.

Whatever you do, try to take written or visual notes of:

• are they affiliate sites or merchant/direct sale sites?
• the style of landing page used (1-product review, multi-review, comparison, blog, flog, farticle-style, ecommerce-style, etc.)
• the use of colors and graphical theme (is there a recurring trend across competitors?)
• their strong points and weak points (look for both their flaws and things you can derive inspiration from)

Gather all of this, and start visualizing how you could combine the best aspects of them all – and blend it into your own variations. It’s ok to borrow layouts, themes, style, and colors. Just don’t be a douche and steal images and text as you see it. Don’t imitate. Learn from the best – and innovate!
PPC Bully allows for you to get further ahead in your launch. For me – this means reducing my testing budget and being closer to breaking even on a new campaign right from the start. Using all this intel, combined with my Keyword Rockstar findings, I’m miles ahead of the dude next door entering into the same niche without it.

I mentioned in my Keyword Rockstar review that it also can spy on competitors and and landing pages like PPC Bully can. This still holds true, but the key difference is that PPC Bully allows a more automated approach to competition ad and landing page spy research. You can gather the same data with Keyword Rockstar, but it means you need to manually gather this data with each run, say once a day or once a week. PPC Bully works 24/7 on the server while you sleep – and this is its biggest strength.

And this brings me to another advantage PPC Bully monitoring gives you – spying on other advertisers’ ad scheduling AND positioning. Since PPC Bully tracks so much data over time – it is also very usable for finding out the times of day, or the days of the week, when conversions (and ROI) is probably running higher. Take a look at the top advertisers for a set of keywords.

Does it seem like they are bidding for higher ad positioning on fridays and saturdays? Perhaps none of them run ads on sundays? Their ads are showing much more frequently between 5pm and 11pm? For many niches – you will quickly see a pattern here. Because your competitors have already found out through tedious testing that those dates and times yield better ROI for their ad campaigns. And now – you have an idea of how to start out your own scheduling. Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

What’s On Offer?

Ok, so what else can we learn from our “been-running-campaigns-for-a-while” competitors? Well – choice of offers of course. Now this one is more vague than the other stuff like ads and landing pages. And that because there are so many offers to choose from in all verticals these days.

And.. offers come and go, their conversions can be unpredictable, or your competitor may have various reasons for choosing to run what might be a crappy offer for you. So – I rarely pay too much attention to the exact offers being ran. I prefer checking with my affiliate managers what the current top offers are in the niche. Then split-test between the best ones.

Now – using PPC Bully to see what offers others are running isn’t entirely useless. You could at least get a better picture of what KINDS of offers are being promoted the most. Is it mostly Clickbank/info products? Mostly physical real items? Or perhaps brief lead forms? If you’re clueless about what to do in the niche, try asking your affiliate managers about those offers, how they convert on their networks – or if they can provide them to you on request.

The PPC Bully guys also just released a new browser toolbar, combining easy access to all their services and useful links in one place.

So… how do you YOU use PPC Bully? Or, if you haven’t used it, what methods or other tools do you use to gather knowledge from competitors in the field? Leave your comments below! Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.