SpyFu - Thoughts and Reviews?

Hi guys, just a quick question. I'm not a big fan of Spyfu, Keyword Spy etc, I know some people are but I've never found them to be particularly reliable. We just bought a yearly subscription to Spyfu today for our PPC team which cost about $700 and so far I have to admit I'm less than impressed.

I've always been sceptical about this kind of software because we know that the data held about a PPC account is strictly confidential and nobody except the account managers and PPC company (Google in this case) has access to it. I have been having a play around with it today and tried it out on a few of my clients.

My thoughts:

The list of keywords that it generates is pretty good, however it is by no means complete. I don't understand how it gets this info in the first place because it cannot go into my account and get them, nor can it search Google thousands of time in a split second for every related term it finds in my site to see if the ad shows up. Strange but I am assuming it has alot to do with the site search on the Google Keyword tool. All in all not too shabby with regards to generating ideas for new keywords from your competitors.

Daily Spend, CPC etc - Absolute Garbage! Tested it on a lot of different sites with varying spend and the spend is just not accurate at all. to give you an idea of how far off the mark it was - I tested on a client we manage - big spender in the region of $7k per day on adwords - SpyFu told me that it spent between $200 and $1.75K per day! For a start this is no where near what it spends and secondly - what kind of a ridiculous range is that!? You can't make any sort of competitor analysis based on that! at about $5 per click that could be the difference between your competitor receving 40 clicks per day or 350 clicks per day (in my case the tool would have been off by about 1100 clicks per day!


I do think the layout of the tool etc is good and the analysis tools are good too but I just think the data is complete junk and could be very costly for new marketers who use trust the data on there.

Like I said I have tried this on a quite a lot of competitors (some well established, some not so well established) and the results were all way off apart from the keywords (which in my opinon could have just been taken from the Google Keyword Tool).

Im just glad that the office bought this and not me because I would have felt a bit robbed.

Does anybody here use SpyFu and if so do you have better results than I am seeing? what are your thoughts?

Thanks Guys

Ross