When I went over to this site, it allows you to enter any domain and, as long as they have an ad campaign running, it extracts a list of the keywords that domain is using and it shows their ad placement positions versus the competition. It's designed to extract the information that is enabling your competitor's success.
When I entered my own domain, it did indeed bring up the actual keywords that I have entered on my Google AdWords Account Campaigns, as well as showing my actual ad position ratings as compared with the rest. Whilst I can hardly worry about the more obvious keywords (anyone with any common sense could choose them), there are some more 'creative' variations that I have used that successfully trigger my ads.
I must admit that I'm a bit cheesed off that information that is used exclusively within my AdWords account is being made available for public consumption. Some of these keywords do not even appear anywhere on my own pages (and yes, I can still get them to trigger ads), so they must have been fished for via Adwords somehow?
I guess, in some perverse way, it's flattering that some competitor/s has found me to be more successful in my AdWords campain than they'd like me to be, but is there any way I can stop them accessing my information? All I've tried so far is adding keywordspy.com to my ip deny list. In fact, I'm not even sure what it was up to on my site - as I said, the keywords are apparently being taken from my Adwords campaign, not lifted from my site coding.
Comments anyone?
capercaillie
[edited by: skibum at 1:23 am (utc) on Mar. 7, 2008]
[edit reason] there are a bunch of these, removed name of this specific one [/edit]
[edited by: 300m at 9:01 pm (utc) on Mar. 5, 2008]
This is an obvious underground marketing technique.
there so much more info beside keywords that you would need to rip someone off. Heck I could guess most of the keywords of any ad you give me using any keyword tool.
What about grouping? bids? time schedules? rotation? content vs search?
These types of tools do a few things.
Give you a rough estimate of the size of campaigns run by various sites
Show you just how broad, broad match can be
Can help you save a fortune if you know what to do with the data and have room to improve the targeting of your campaigns
They show what looks like a lot of junk. It is and as advertisers it shows us a lot of junk that we are paying for
If they get to the point of showing the not only the keyword but the complete ad that is triggered by it, depending on how the site has its campaign setup, you can tell an awful lot about what the site is doing and how the campaigns are setup
It can give you some insight into who is visiting your site and what else they search for
For a site that specializes in really big womens shoes, the site owners told us that a chunk of their customer base weren't exactly women. The engine picked this up and was showing ads based on other queries this audience performed. :)
I suspect that this is nothing more than an advertising technique. If you consider the fact that their target demographic are webmasters, what better way to reach them than by showing up in their site stats. It's log spam!
