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Open Ads - Open Source Ad Inventory Management
The Big List of Affiliate Marketing Events
Secret To Get On The First Page Of Google

There has been a flurry of products recently focusing on “spying on your AdWords competition”. For example, there is X-Ray Domination which sells for $1500 (program is closed for the moment), Undercover Profits (sold out)at $291 per month (yikes!), and Google Cash Detective for a $497 up-front payment and $97 per month (sold out). Then there is AdSpyPro which goes for $67. What they have in common is that they allow you to specify a list of keywords and check on the advertisers who are promoting using Google AdWords. You can set it so that the software will automatically check the ad positions daily or at some other specified interval.

The rationale is that if you find someone advertising as an affilliate and they have been running the ads for a long time, chances are they are making a profit doing it and you can optimize your ads and beat them. If they are in position #1 for weeks or months on end, you can outbid them with your campaign and topple them from their spot. However, the drawback is that if they have deeper pockets than you, they can outspend you for a longer period of time, sacrifice some profits and kick you back out.

Looking at how quickly these programs sell out and the prices they command, clearly there is a huge demand from affiliates for this sort of thing. I haven’t tried any of the above mentioned programs. What I have personally used for this sort of thing is the same functionality you can get with Keyword Elite. I have been tracking a bunch of keywords for two Clickbank products that have been running for a long time. I set it to check the ads once a day. It looks like some affiliate is making good money with those products since they have been in the top 1-4 ad positions for an extended period of time. I haven’t tried to overthrow them yet. I’m going to keep watching for a little while longer.

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