GoogSpy, one of my favorite tools, has been rebranded with lots of enhancements. The free, Web-based tool for competitor research is now SpyFu.
Velocityscape launched GoogSpy.com in April 2005 to enable people to sleuth out the keywords their competitors were buying on Google AdWords.
That functionality is very useful for me, as an affiliate manager, to monitor trademarks and discover the keywords affiliates are bidding on.
It is also great for affiliates to see what their competitors are bidding on. Huge time saver for gathering competitive intelligence.
The name has changed to SpyFu partly because it’s become more than a Google AdWords competitive intelligence tool. They have plans for the near future to expand it to cover other search engines.
GoogSpy was free for all, but there are features of SpyFu that will only be available to subscribers. The good news is that the free data on SpyFu is more robust than what used to be available on GoogSpy.
Here are the features of SpyFu:
- Search by Domain (No Cost)
- Browse by Category and Industries (No Cost)
- Search by Domain (i.e. Microsoft.com) and view
- Estimated Daily Advertising Budget (No Cost)
- Total Clicks Per Day (No Cost)
- Average Cost per Click (No Cost)
- Average Click Day (No Cost)
- Average Ad Position (No Cost)
- Average Ad Competitors (No Cost)
- Average Ad Percentile (No Cost)
- Alexa Rank (No Cost)
- Incoming Links (No Cost)
- Average Load Time (No Cost)
- Top 10 Organic Results (No Cost)
- All Organic Results up to 50th position w/stats in downloadable format (Subscription Only)
- Top 10 Ads (No Cost)
- All Advertisements up to 50th position w/stats in downloadable format (Subscription Only)
- Top 20 Organic Competitors (No Cost)
- All Organic Competitors w/stats in downloadable format (Subscription Only)
- Top 20 Ad Competitors (No Cost)
- All Ad Competitors w/stats in downloadable format (Subscription Only)
- Up to 15 Sub Domains for the parent domain (No Cost)
- Listing of all Sub Domains (Subscription Only)
- Up to 15 Other Domains Owned (No Cost)
- Up to 5 of the Categories the Domain is listed in (No Cost)
- Listing of all Categories the Domain is listed in (Subscription Only)
- Search by Term (i.e. Cars) and view
- Cost per Click (No Cost)
- Click per Day (No Cost)
- Cost per Day (No Cost)
- Number of Advertisers (No Cost)
- Number of Organic Search Results (No Cost)
- Top 5 AdWords results (advertiser) by Domain with Ad (No Cost)
- Top 50 AdWords results (advertiser by Domain) with Ad (No Cost)
- Top 10 Organic Search Results with description (No Cost)
- Top 50 Organic Search results by Domain (No Cost)
- Up to15 Terms Competitors also bought (No Cost)
- Complete list of AdWords Competitors also bought w/stats in downloadable format (Subscription Only)
- Up to 15 Terms related to the searched Term (No Cost)
- Complete list of Related Terms w/stats in downloadable format (Subscription Only)
- Up to 15 Terms contextually related to the searched Term (No Cost)
- Complete list Terms contextually related to the searched Term w/stats in downloadable format (Subscription Only)
- Up to 5 Categories the Term is listed in
- Listing of all Categories the term appears in (Subscription Only)
SpyFu is powered by Web Scraper Plus+ to gather data from sources around the web and to monitor specific data points. This information comes from search engines, Alexa data, DMOZ categories, and variety of other sources. They are using their data manipulation and cleansing skills to parse and structure the data. Then they are using Bayesian logic to sort, compare, and compile statistics and data.
According to Michael J. Roberts, President of Velocityscape (and Proprietor of SpyFu), “SpyFu.com has nearly 20 times more data than GoogSpy, and the coolest statistics imaginable. This time we believe did it right.”