The trouble with competitive SEM tools

by cat on February 9, 2010 · 0 comments

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I’ve written about competitive tools before, but my last post was more of a general tool roundup. This post addresses a huge issue with competitive search marketing tools: accuracy, or lack thereof.

There are several tools I’ve been keeping an eye on for the past year or so: SpyFu, SEMrush, and KeywordCompetitor. I check these out from time to time, because aside from the known issues with spy tools in general (including impression jacking and clickfraud), I would love to have one I could trust for competitive information. Last week I decided to dive into SpyFu and take a closer look, in hopes that it had improved over the last year or so.
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Migrating AdWords Campaigns

September 12, 2009
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One of my clients is getting too big for its britches, so recently I had to split their AdWords campaigns into three separate accounts. AdWords will only allow 25 campaigns per account, and they had a lot of campaigns because they are running ads targeted to different geographic areas. In addition, they wanted to use [...]

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Twitter for business…a year later

August 26, 2009
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It was almost exactly a year ago that I created a Twitter account for my company to use as a marketing and awareness tool. Since that time we’ve gained 300+ followers, which won’t set any records in the Twitterverse but does show a steady increase. We don’t do a lot of active outreach or blind [...]

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Opt out of Google's behavioral ads

March 12, 2009
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When Google’s merger with Doubleclick was announced last year, we knew there were going to be some privacy concerns associated with all that data sharing. Now we’re seeing the first of those issues: Google announced yesterday that they are implementing behavioral ad targeting. They are calling it “interest-based” advertising, but make no mistake; it’s based [...]

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Seven Steps to Successful Google Image Ads

February 17, 2009
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I’m about to make my first foray into Google’s Image Ads, which are contextual ads in standard IAB image ad sizes and formats. I plan to begin with static image ads and then try Flash ads from the Display Ad Builder.
I try not to run blindly into any new ventures, so I set out to [...]

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