Velocityscape recently launched their new product SpyFu that lets companies gain an important insight into how much their competitors are spending on advertising. Velocityscape, founded in 1999 and bootstrapped by Michael Roberts, has been in the business of developing web scraping tools and providing custom analytics to enterprise clients. Currently they offer ‘Web Scraper Plus+’, which is a complete web extraction and automation suite.SpyFu seems to be the next logical move, utilizing their expertise in the scraping and analytics area.
Consider a case of a chocolate manufacturing/retail company trying to chalk out their advertising budget. Obviously they will like to know how much the top market players are spending on online ads. Using SpyFu they can search for the term ‘chocolate’ and quickly get a basic set of results including Cost/Click, Clicks/Day, Cost/Day, Advertisers, Search Results for that keyword. Besides these results, SpyFu also gives the list of top advertisers for that keyword, list of other keywords bought by competitors, related terms, and related concepts. So, one of the advertisers for the keyword ‘chocolate’ is Godiva.com. If you click on the link for Godiva.com, SpyFu drills down further to get you the daily ad budget, total clicks per day Godiva is getting, keyword for which Godiva is advertising, and number of other important stats related to Godiva. If you try getting these kind of results by yourself, you might end up hiring a specialist for this job. At SpyFu most of this data is available for free right now.
For computing the results SpyFu takes into account data from various sources with the main being Google. Using the Google Adwords budget estimator and Velocityscape’s collection of over 2 million keywords, they are able to get a basic set of data and results including average time position of ad, time of the day ad shows up, and number of ads placed. Other major sources from where data is extracted include dmoz, Dunn&Brad Street, Hoovers, and Wikipedia. SpyFu feeds all this data into it’s proprietary algorithm, which among other things take cares of volume discounts offered by Google to large advertising clients like eBay.
The resulting data is compared to advertising spending declared by public companies in SEC 10s to judge the accuracy of the computation. However the same comparison is not possible in case of private companies. In my talk with Michael, he claimed that SpyFu results are accurate 90% of the times. Michael frankly admitted that in few cases you might get results for unknown and small sized companies showing to have high ad budget, which can obviously not be correct. However looking at the results for eBay at SpyFu, which is one using the biggest advertisers, you can easily tell that the results are pretty close to what eBay actually spends. Another factor that can influence the results is that SpyFu data is the refresh rate of the backend data, which is currently refreshed every 30-60 days and stands at 450 GB in size. SpyFu team will looking to further reduce the refresh time to offer fresher results.
As part of future plans SpyFu is planning to add features like trademark monitoring, favorites list, include data from Yahoo and MSN to provide more comprehensive set of results, and provide graphical trends of keyword pricing over time.
SpyFu does seem to be very solid offering. It will be interesting to see how companies incorporate SpyFu results into their advertising plans.
Links:
SpyFu
VelocityScape
December 2, 2006 at 5:19 am |
[...] I read on Startup Squad that if a chocolate company wanted to figure out what competitors are paying for online advertising, they could log on to SpyFu and search for the keyword, “chocolate” to find out costs per click, clicks per day, cost per day, the advertisers involved, and the search results that are pulled up for the various keywords. [...]
December 8, 2006 at 1:17 am |
[...] Still I appreciate the fact that Google listens to what goes on in the blogosphere and does take time to reply. So as part of my due diligence(I should have done this earlier though), I ran few searches on SpyFu for the keywords mentioned on CD blog. I have written about SpyFu last week which basically lets users estimate what a particular keyword will cost on Google Adwords system per/click basis, and the approximate amount you will need to spend on a campaign for that keyword per day. [...]
December 12, 2007 at 10:53 am |
It’s been over a year since this post was made and SpyFu has matured greatly since then! I have 20 promo codes to give away with 50% lifetime discount!
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June 24, 2008 at 5:36 am |
Have you heeard about iSpionage.com? I just started using it.. it’s great. I can instantly size up the keywords my competitors are using and check out their ad copy across Google, Yahoo and MSN as well. I’ve never seen any tool that does this kind of thing before.
September 19, 2008 at 6:11 am |
[...] The Small (but Great) SpyFu Experiment Filed under: ppc — Tags: ppc, spyfu — Richard Fergie @ 10:39 am submit_url = “http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2008/09/the-small-but-great-spyfu-experiment.html”; For those of you not in the loop, spyfu.com is a web service that provides information on who is bidding on what keywords as well as further information on competitors’ daily ad spend as well as their average CPC. The startup squad have a great article on what spyfu does and how it does it. [...]
October 7, 2008 at 6:42 am |
[...] For those of you not in the loop, spyfu.com is a web service that provides information on who is bidding on what keywords as well as further information on competitors’ daily ad spend as well as their average CPC. The startup squad have a great article on what spyfu does and how it does it. [...]