What's every affiliate marketer's dream? Well, I can't speak for every affiliate marketer out there, but I can certainly share my own.
I'd like to reap huge profits from my affiliate marketing with:
- Less work
- Less research
- Less time
- Less money
- Less trial and error
Actually, my dream would be "none" not "less" but I'm trying to be realistic here. Basically, I want to know what works and what doesn't so I can spend my time, cash and energy on the moneymakers.
The closest I think we can come to this particular dream is through competitive intelligence (more commonly known as "spy tools").
PPC Bully is a brand new product to hit the market that's purpose-built for internet marketers and particularly affiliate marketers.
PPC Bully enables you to sniff out what your competitors are doing and even more importantly - HOW they are doing. It's one thing to see which keywords and ads your competitor is using, but you really want to find out whether it's working for them. There's no point borrowing knowledge if their campaigns are not actually performing.
You can get "secret" information on competitors' keywords, ads, landing pages and merchants. So before you've even launched a campaign, you've got the benefits of trial and error, months of ad testing and research, the best keywords and times to run your ads - all courtesy of PPC Bully and ssshh, your competitors.
The main purpose of PPC Bully's existence is to tell you what works and what doesn't - BEFORE you start putting your PPC campaign together.
Once you've got successful keywords, ads and landing page ideas, you can then launch your campaign with a big headstart and eliminate time, effort and money you might have poured into getting it off the ground. Even more if you're using SpeedPPC : )
Insider Information from PPC Bully
To create a project is as easy as clicking Add Project, typing in the name, choosing a country to research and adding some keywords.
Adding a project to PPC Bully takes a few seconds
It takes about 36 hours for the first results to filter through and after that, the data is updated daily.
Here's what you can find out through PPC Bully: (this is gold, so read it fully)
Keywords & Ads
- View live ad creative that your competitors use for the keywords you've entered.
- PPC Bully will tell you whether it's an affiliate ad.
- You'll see which PPC keyword was searched on to find the ad.
- Find out the last position of the ad and it's average position in the search results.
View competitors' ad creative, profitability index, whether it's an affiliate ad and the ad position.
- You can tell when the ad was first seen and when it was last seen - so you can get a good idea if it's performing well by its longevity. If an advertiser is still using it, there's a good chance it's working well for them.
- See the distribution frequency the ad is being shown since first detected - calculated by days and times.
- Click a button to see what other ads are going to the same destination URL so you can see all the ad copy a particular advertiser is running.
PPC Bully shows you ad running times, when it was first and last seen, plus other ads running for the same site.
- Display a charted history of the ad by date and position.
Graph in PPC Bully showing ad distribution over one week - it can also be viewed over a month, 3 months and 6 months.
- The hourly distribution of an ad so you can see when it appears during the day - the practical application of this is that another advertiser may have done testing and found out which times of day convert better. You can then schedule your ads to a similar pattern through AdWords to take advantage of this knowledge.
This graph shows the ad is running every hour, however the peak times are obvious.
- Click the ad information button to display even more ad properties. Below is an example:
View ad information such as titles, descriptions, site links.
- Find out how many ads are running and how many are actually profitable
- See a further breakdown on how many affiliate ads there are and how many are profitable
- View the Profitability index of each ad and keyword. (This is PPC Bully's profitability rating which I'll show you further down in this review)
PPC Bully shows you the number of ads running per keyword and how many are performing.
Landing Pages
- View the landing page that the ad directs searchers to (this beats searching Google manually any day)
Affiliates
- Find out the affiliate running the ad in question
You can actually look up all the ads for a particular affiliate ID or merchant and see which keywords they are using. PPC Bully also lists whether the ad is an affiliate's next to the ad copy. Just click on the magnifying glass to search out the rest of that affiliate's ads. Neat huh?
The "Bully" Feature
One of the stand-out features in PPC Bully is called the "Bully".
If there's a particular project you want to focus on, mark it as Bully. It's a powerful feature that performs an hourly scan on your competition - up to 24 hours a day.
Select your project in PPC Bully and click the Bully button.
By also marking particular keywords as "Bully Keywords", you can track the top performing ads and how many times a day they are shown and what times during the successful ads are shown. This helps you set your ad scheduling in Google AdWords, to save you money running ads at times when they don't perform the best.
This feature gives you intensive competitive information by the hour so you can be right on the ball with optimizing your PPC campaigns. Sounds like CNN news feed…
PPC Bully's Profitability Indicator
There are other tools that show you competitor ads, but after that it's up to you to guess the ads that you think are performing. It's like when web analytics was first birthed - you had all this data, but no useful analysis of it. PPC Bully takes this a giant step further.
PPC Bully has a profitability indicator (PI) that rates the ads, so you can best judge which ads to pay attention to. This is a brilliant idea and combined with the number of profitable ads and their average and latest positions, you can put it to good use without needing to do extra analysis.
Here's a sneak peak at their formula for ad profitability:
Ad PI = (Number of Days Seen * Percentage Seen) / Number of Days since Last Seen
For example:
Ad "Birthday Flowers" was seen 12 days out of 18. The Ad was last seen 2 days ago.
Number of Days Seen: 12 days
Percentage Seen: 12/18 = 66.6%
Number of Days since Last Seen: 2 days
P-Index = (12 * 66.6%) / 2 = 4
Beside each ad PPC bully shows you is its profitability indicator so you can get an idea of how that ad copy is performing. PPC Bully recommends that an ad should have a PI of at least 7 to be profitable.
PPC Bully Packages
There are three packages you can subscribe to depending on what size projects you plan to run. You can get 500, 2000 and 5000 keywords accounts, with each package having access to all the PPC Bully features. If you're looking at more than 5000 words, the PPC Bully experts can create a tailor-made solution for your business.What countries does PPC Bully cover?
Even if you're in one country but marketing products in another, you can create projects (one country per project) to research these regions, regardless of where you are - Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Greece, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom and United States.Pros & Cons of PPC Bully
Pros
- Super-easy to use, you can start straight away
- Easy set-up, no tricky installation - just subscribe to the service, updates keep running 24/7 while you're subscribed. This also means there's no need to download any upgrades.
- Ability to trace keywords, ads, landing pages, affiliate IDs
- Access it anywhere with an internet connection
- Support all the major CPA networks (40+)
- The ability to run full scans 24 hours a day
- English and International Support
- Regions Research (not just restricted to the USA as some tools are)
- Advanced Reports
- Unlimited Projects (up to 5000 keywords total)
- Download your project files to csv
Cons
- Only support Google (although they'll be adding other engines soon)
- You need to enter your match types specifically, so you'd manually enter the same keyword 3 times if you wanted broad, phrase and exact (this would be great to have as an automatic option)
- Not many regions covered in Asia (yet anyway)
This looks a bit lopsided, but honestly I can't add more cons without being completely unrealistic - like wanting to know exact bid prices, daily budgets, conversion rates etc.
Is PPC Bully Worth it?
This is relative, however I tend to measure a tool's worth by my time - money I can get back, time I can't.
$49 to me is equivalent to about half an hour of my time. So in that sense, $49/month is definitely worthwhile since it's going to save me a whole lot more than half an hour each month. That's before you consider money savings too.
Of course, the other consideration I have is the unfair advantage of a tool like PPC Bully in the hands of my competitors. That scares me a bit so it's an advantage I don't want to pass off while someone else is using it on me!
They offer a 60 day money-back guarantee which is very generous, and plenty of time for you to figure out whether it'll pay for itself. At $49/month, it's highly likely but you're not risking anything to try it.
PPC Bully Summed Up
What I liked most is how easy PPC Bully is - you don't need to read any documentation to get started. Watch the 3 minute intro video and that should do it.
I must admit I inwardly scoffed when I first saw "intuitive" used to describe the interface (visions of Windows Vista coming to mind), but I take it back now. PPC Bully is intuitive and you won't waste any time figuring it out.
It's also well set-out and the clear display means you're not getting frustrated hunting down information. It's all in front of you and very easy to find the right information.
I loved being able to search keywords, ads and landing pages by particular affiliates or merchants. The ability to find out how long an ad has been running for, how many times a day it shows and when the advertiser is running it is also extremely useful information.
I learned more from using it than I would've found out on my own through trial and error anyway. It gives you access to insider information that's impossible to get off your own bat.
See more of PPC Bully in action and check out the video here.
