Maximize Your Marketing Strategies With the Ultimate Spying Toolkit

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I love to spy.

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I love it.

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I don't understand why anybody would approach any market, any industry, any

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offer, any new campaign without first looking at what's already working.

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And it's so accessible.

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It's so accessible.

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There's so much information out there.

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That's actually what makes it hard, there's an overwhelming

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delusion of information out there.

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So what I wanna do today is I'm gonna go over my best, most favorite of

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spy tools with you, for you that you can use in order to see what other

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people are doing in your space now.

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A quick note about the paradigm to assume.

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The first one is don't just look at your straight middle of the road competitors.

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should start there probably just to see what they're doing and maybe more

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importantly what they're not doing.

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and there's wisdom here, by the way, because there's something about

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creativity that kills us all very often.

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That great idea that you just can't believe nobody else has had.

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It's been had tried and failed multiple times.

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the very firm opinion, and this isn't my quote, it's on Ngal.

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He says that marketing is not a creative endeavor.

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Marketing is a data driven endeavor with creative elements maybe that repels you.

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I don't care.

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I don't care because my way makes money.

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So you can be Don Draper glass Scotch sitting around white boarding things all

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day till you're blue in the face, fine.

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But unless you allow for data-driven influence, you are always

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going to be at a disadvantage.

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And what that means is looking at what other people are doing

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and what's working for them.

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And so take what your competitors are doing and start there.

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Can you improve upon it?

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Iterate it go tangentially Better than it, yes.

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But the minute you start doing things that are massively far afield, I

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think you're putting yourself at a significant disadvantage unless.

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It has to do with your business model, unique selling proposition.

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there's the whole Henry Ford thing.

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If I gave people what they wanted, I would've created a faster horse.

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Fine, fine.

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But if you're selling horses, don't go advertising the automobile.

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Make sense?

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Cool.

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In order to see what's working with your competitors you wanna

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start using some of the software tools that are available to you.

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The first, not the best, but the first one that I would bring up is

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SEM Rush, s e m, rush sem Rush is more expensive than I like to pay

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unless I'm using it on a daily basis.

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That said, it has more information than any tool.

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In existence as far as competitor analysis, as a matter of fact, it's

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massively overwhelming and you really have to go learn how to use S scm Rush

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in order for it to be usable for you.

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Now, s Scem Rush is often u looked at as organic first, which I don't know

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that I disagree with, but it has an amazing list of tool sets that can be

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utilized by paid advertisers in order to see what competitors are doing and

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more importantly how they're doing it.

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And I like to not only look at.

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Add copy creative, which is fine, but that's just the first step.

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I like to look at destination URLs.

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I like to see where people are driving traffic.

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And SCM Rush does a really good job at this.

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You can see competitor top performing pages, and when you can

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see somebody's top performing page, you, you get to see their offer.

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You can see their funnel.

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You get to maybe funnel hack, you get to see their one time offers.

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TLS upsells.

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I like knowing where traffic is going after the fact because the ad, I hate

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to say this, but I feel like it's true.

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That's the easy part.

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and it's getting easier now that Google's actually writing our ads for us.

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So SCM Rush amazing tool worth playing with.

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They've got a great free trial.

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go mess around with it.

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They also have a feature set that , It's not just breadth, it's also depth.

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So I'm a pretty big fan of TM Rush.

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Next up on my list, ice espionage.

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Now the ice espionage data is massively unreliable.

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Massively unreliable.

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When I was spending 20 grand a month, ice espionage says we were spending 200.

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Now that I'm spending.

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$200,000 a month is espionage says we're spending 20 and they never get it right.

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Ever for me or any of my clients, I have 200 clients and I can pipe to

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pipe in any one of those clients.

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And, and the spend data that is espionage offers is not just

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wrong, but it's not wrong in a way that allows for consistency.

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If I'm like, oh, is espionage is always, 10% of the truth or

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half of the truth, whatever.

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Well then I can factor in what the truth really is, but my experience so far has

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been that they're just massively off.

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That said, I really like the market trends.

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Information that they offer, because that does seem to be a little bit closer.

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They have a better sense as to, generally speaking, when industries are moving

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or what's happening or what's changing.

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like some of the screen grabs that you get from competitor ads.

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They're obviously going against Google's terms and service.

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There's no way Google wants them doing this.

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But they have this ad effectiveness index algorithm and they're telling

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you what they think ads are working.

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And I think it's probably based off of how long that ad has been running

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and how much market share it's capturing because money's intelligent.

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Nobody will be spending massive amounts of money on ads unless they were performing.

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And so ice spinach has a proprietary algorithm that'll tell you what ads

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are working the best, you can see your competitors best performing ads which

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should help inspire your own creative Espionage has massive blind spots.

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There are industries that you're like, man, this is a really small industry.

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Why do you know this much about, vegan leaf blowers and let's just

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like a whole crazy library of nothing but vegan leaf blow blowers.

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And then on the other end you're like, why do you know nothing about car insurance?

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where is this?

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can't speak to that.

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It obviously has to do with their own internal system.

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But for all of its failings, it's a great tool, super inexpensive, really worth

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playing with, really worth looking at.

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Next up, SpyFu SpyFu, the founders are actually right here in Scotsdale, Arizona.

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Homegrown and spite food's a lot like s scm, rush and espionage.

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it's something of a Me Too software.

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The thing that I really like about SpyFu though is it has look back

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capabilities that the other products either, don't have or don't have.

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Well, and it has historical data on certain markets that goes back years.

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So what's really cool is when you can see what somebody's been doing for years,

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you can see a trend in their iteration.

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Which means you can see them starting, I threw spaghetti into the wall and

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then I started to figure out what works.

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And I think that those iterative trends, if you're really paying attention and

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you're doing the work in the deep dive, they can be massively, massively helpful.

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So check out SpyFu specifically for the look back.

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It's not applicable to every industry.

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You have to go see if SpyFu has data on your industry.

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And if they do, great, and if they don't, you're sol.

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Last but not least PPC Ad Lab.

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It's owned by my buddy Rob Warner.

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This thing is cool, not an affiliate.

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I should be Rob.

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You should be paying me money, bro.

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What is going on?

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Why are you not sponsoring my YouTube channel?

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Let's talk just kidding.

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But really PPC ad Lab is cool because it allows you to monitor specific

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search terms in specific geographic regions on a daily and or hourly basis,

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and then you literally screen grab what's happening within that analysis.

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It's unbelievable.

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So like every hour, you know, I'm betting on arborists in New Jersey, so I wanna

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screen grab everybody who's going after any of these arborist search terms

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every hour in this specific geography.

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And now I get to see a sense of the competition, who's offering what and when

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they're getting the most competitive, which again lets me know when they think.

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The most effective time to bid is, especially because for older school

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industries, people are optimizing based off of dimension, which I

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actually think is a flawed model, but knowing what your competitors

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are doing in that arena can't hurt.

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PPC AdLab, super cool piece of software.

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It has a bunch of other features too that I don't even know about it.

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I know he is been adding lists, but the competitor analysis for

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me is worth the cost of admission.

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It's crazy cheap.

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And what's cool is, You don't just get to see their ads.

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PBC AdLab shows you their landing pages, which again, I think is more

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important than the ads themselves.

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some spy tools.

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Google also just rolled out their Google Ads Transparency Center.

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I shot another video on that.

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That should be live in our YouTube channel shortly if it's not already.

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So you should check that one out too.

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But I would love to know from you, what tools do you use

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to spy on your competitors?

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Anything that I haven't mentioned here, drop it in the comments.

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I'd love to hear about it.

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Always need more tools and other than that, I'll see you tomorrow.