iSpionage is a suite of ppc competitor analysis research, monitoring and analytics tools for use with Google AdWords.

“Steal Your Competitors’ Traffic & Uncover Their Conversion Strategy,” that’s the opening statement on iSpionage’s ppc competitor analysis website and it pretty well sums it up really. I cannot over-emphasis the importance of keeping a very close eye on your competitors when it comes to running effective ppc and natural search campaigns.

You can do everything absolutely right and still lose – because your competitors are doing it a little bit better!

Which is where competitor analysis platforms like iSpionage and Spyfu come into their own.

PPC marketing costs money, sometimes lots of money, so you have to get it right. Google and other ppc platforms are very coy about how much information they give you about how or what your competitors are doing.

Google tells more than the others (see the “Details” tab, just below the graph in your AdWords Campaign Manager dashboard, choose the “Auction Insights” option to see details of your competitor’s activity for the same keywords that you are targeting), but it is very limited, often being based on only a small proportion of the keywords in use.

Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, as far as I know, have no equivalent to this so a third party ppc competitor analysis solution is called for.

Which is why, if you are using pay per click marketing as part of your digital marketing strategy to any great extent, you need a service like iSpionage to help you to make informed decisions about your ppc activity, compared to that of your competitors, and how it affects your overall digital marketing strategy.

iSpionage has manu useful features, including this tremendous landing page gallery which not only shows you thousands of great examples f really good landin pages but also tells you which search terms, (keywords) are triggering those pages to be used. With tools like this you really can srt to hack the funnels of successful competitors and see what their strategy is.

The other, very popular feature worth looking at is the competitor ads report:

With this kind of information about your competitor’s ppc campaigns you’ll probably know more about your competitor’s campaigns than they do.

Data coverage is currently restricted to USA, UK and Canada so if you are outside of those territories its a no go..

Price wise, iSpionage is a paid service, starting at $29 /month for the entry level account and rising up to $299 /month for the Advanced agency account. Savings are available for prepayment and there is, the the time of writing, a limited free trial account offer so it costs nothing to find out more.