Competition.

If you’re like the rest of us, you probably just shuddered a little.

I know—it’s stressful and difficult to think about competing.

But managing your competition is incredibly important and crucial.

In today’s business climate, analyzing competitors and taking their traffic isn’t an option—it’s an essential part of creating a successful online business.

You really can’t go too far without it anymore.

Quite frankly, any visitor or customer your competitors gain is one you’ve lost.

So the only play is to take their traffic before they take yours.

Unfortunately, stealing traffic isn’t as easy as asking your competitors for spreadsheets with all their traffic data.

However, you can get around this roadblock by investing in a competitor analysis tool.

This is where iSpionage comes in handy. With the help of iSpionage, you can analyze your competitors’ strategies and beat them at their own game.

The wide variety of tools such as competitor PPC keyword lists, downloadable keyword lists, historic data and many others that I’ll discuss allows you to accurately and efficiently analyze competitor strategies and develop your own.

What Is iSpionage?

iSpionage is a company that aims to provide people with competitive intelligence and actionable steps for improving their PPC strategies.

According to their website, they have worked with over 35,000 PPC advertisers and agencies and have been featured on many different magazines and reviews such as Forbes, Entrepreneur and others.

The database that iSpionage uses is incredibly large and covers the three largest search engines—Google, Yahoo and Bing.

It includes 92 million keywords, 108 million ad copy variations and 45 million domains, which basically means that you don’t have to worry about whether or not the information you’re getting is accurate or up-to-date.

By taking advantage of this vast database, you’ll be able to understand better the in’s and out’s of your competitors’ strategies while combating them with your own.

iSpionage Review: The #1 Competitor Analysis Tool to Sneak Your Way to the Top

There is a massive number of tools on iSpionage, so let’s take a quick look through some of the most important ones while focusing on competitor research and stealing traffic.

Competitor Advertising Analysis

Analyzing competitor advertising decisions is one of the most important tricks you can do with iSpionage. This includes being able to look at their landing pages, PPC ads and target audiences. With this knowledge, you can really understand their goals and methods and apply what works to your own website.

SEO and PPC Historic Data

SEO and PPC historic data are available, which means you’re able to look at how certain SEO and PPC keywords have performed over time. Having this knowledge is invaluable to understand market trends and to choose excellent keywords that bring in more traffic. By understanding your competitors’ strategies over time, you can better understand their overall strategy.

Branded Competitor Reports

iSpionage also gives you the option to download branded competitor reports, which is perfect for any SEO professional who helps other businesses grow and bring in more traffic. These reports include all the essential data to understand competitors such as PPC strategies and profitable keywords. Having access to these reports is also an excellent way to track and store competitor movements and changes.

Competitor Budget Estimate

One tool that I find very interesting, useful and surprising is the approximate ad and PPC budget of your opponents.

By seeing price trends and the current Google AdWords strategies of your competitors, iSpionage can construct an approximate budget that you can then base your own financial decisions off of.

This is like peeking around the financial situation of your competitors, which gives you a massive edge in making your own decisions about spending on ads and PPC.

Ad Effectiveness Index

Ads that don’t generate a response are basically just expensive Facebook posts or random banners on other websites. That’s why you can use the ad effectiveness index to determine which of your competitors’ ads actually draw in new visitors and then mimic those strategies to generate more traffic on your website.

Click Through Rate (CTR)

Click through rate improvement is the purpose of ads and PPC, so take advantage of these tools. Attracting more people to your website from ad placements is incredibly important.

SEM Performance Tracker

SEM performance tracking is another incredibly useful tool and is also one of the most convenient features of iSpionage.

After entering a few pieces of information like domain name and keywords, you’ll have a report of your SEM performance and that of your competitors on a specified basis. This report includes information like average ad position and number of new ads.

Campaign Monitoring

Full funnel campaign monitorization gives you your competitors’ entire campaign at a glance—PPC ads, landing pages and keywords—so you can take advantage of their strategies and weak points to steal their traffic.

A/B Test Surveillance

An exciting and useful feature is the A/B test surveillance feature. It’s very sneaky and smart.

With this tool, you can monitor the success of A/B testing performed by your competitor. Information like that gives you the resources to copy your competitors’ successful ads without having to test them to see what works.

Landing Page Tools

The landing page research gallery and side-by-side landing page comparisons tools serve to help you understand how to make a good landing page that creates conversions.

To do this, iSpionage allows you to arrange several different landing pages, and the options each have, next to each other. You can organize competitors’ landing pages and turn on alerts for whenever any changes are made.

This is an effective way to monitor your competitors’ ad strategy and copy anything that might help you beat them with your ads.

Email Alerts

Actionable email alerts, as previously mentioned, contain any marketing changes any of your competitors have made throughout the previous week. The steps laid out in these emails remain relevant and actionable so you stay current and on top.

Another great feature of these email alerts is informing you of new competitors who enter the field. This gives you a heads up so you can react before it becomes a threat.

SERP (Search Engine Results Page) Snapshots

Finally, the SERP snapshots simply show you how specific keywords appear on search engines on any given day. You can change the search date to analyze and ensure you’re constantly ranking high and taking your competitor’s traffic.

Competition and Drawbacks

While iSpionage is a fantastic tool, it has competitors and some potential drawbacks.

For me, the most glaring drawback is the lack of suitable instruction for beginner business owners or people new to the field of SEO.

If anyone decides to use this tool, it’s better if they had at least some background in SEO or some experience in the field to familiarize with the jargon.

Now, this is clearly not a fault of the site—it’s simply my opinion that readers should know the site is geared more towards people with a little bit of experience.

One other site that competes with iSpionage in the field of competitor analysis is SpyFu, which shines in its simplicity and ease of use.

While SpyFu tools are not as comprehensive, it does an excellent job on a more limited number of functions—namely competitor PPC keyword research—and doesn’t worry about the rest.

iSpionage Pricing Options

iSpionage has several different pricing options to cater to the needs of both a business or individual.

The prices increase depending on how much you need. If the fundamental tools are enough for you, the Basic Plan is perfect.

However, if you need more advanced tools, it’s smart to use the 30-day money-back guarantee trial for the more expensive plans—Starter, Professional or Advanced—to at least see if it offers what you need.

There are excellent tools available at each of the prices. It’s only a question of how much you need.

Conclusion

iSpionage is an excellent competitor analysis tool that truly shines in its database and breadth of tool uses.

If you’re a business owner looking to beat your competition or an SEO and marketing professional, you’ll find the tools and insight you need to do so in iSpionage.

There are many different competitor analysis tools, so I recommend that you try several to see which suits you best.

iSpionage, however, does have the most extensive tool suite I’ve seen, so it’s definitely an excellent choice for people who are serious about their SEO and marketing strategies.

Go give it a try to sneak your way to the top!

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Yassir Sahnoun is a content strategist, writer and co-founder of WriteWorldwide. He helps SaaS businesses with content strategy and SEO. You can learn more about Yassir at YassirSahnoun.com.

 

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