Is It Worth Spying on Your Competitor’s PPC Ads Using Spyfu?
Spyfu has been around since 2006 and as of this writing, their homepage meta title says they’re a Competitor Keyword Research Tool for Google Ads. They claim to expose the search marketing secret formula of your most successful competitors. Sounds great right? If only you knew what your competitors were doing with their ads, you could just copy them and just sit back and profit. Easy right?
Eh, not quite. Here’s why the data provided by SpyFu is actually not very valuable:
It’s not very accurate, the CEO even says their numbers are only estimates, so we’re expected to make decisions on these rough estimates?
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Spyfu has been around since 2006 and as of this writing, their homepage meta title says they’re a Competitor Keyword Research Tool for Google Ads. They claim to expose the search marketing secret formula of your most successful competitors. Sounds great right? If only you knew what your competitors were doing with their ads, you could just copy them and just sit back and profit. Easy right?
Eh, not quite. Here’s why the data provided by SpyFu is actually not very valuable:
It’s not very accurate, the CEO even says their numbers are only estimates, so we’re expected to make decisions on these rough estimates?
It doesn’t give us very useful data. Who cares what the competition is using in the ad copy or what keywords they’re targeting. Without seeing their conversion data and ROAS figures, we don’t know what’s working for them and what’s not working for them. We don’t even know if their campaign is being properly managed, for all we know they have some inexperienced team member managing the campaign who is already stretched thin. In other words, we're not getting the full picture.
Successful businesses differentiate themselves from their competition. Copying your competition is a horrible way to differentiate. It may get you by for a while but it’s not a great long-term business strategy and is a race to the bottom.
Instead, it’s better to just create campaigns based on your own experiences and what you know your target audience or customers want.
Properly set up conversion tracking for leads AND sales.
Properly set up your campaign and make adjustments based on what’s making you money, and test things you think might improve results based on past performance, past experiences and good old fashion intuition.
Listen to your customers. Focus on what you can control. Forget what your competitors are doing.