I agree with your assessment that where you are taking these visitors and what you are doing with them there is more important than monitoring everybody else’s campaign.

In any case, if you are in a heavyweight market you will be looking at the SERPS often enough to know what your competition are doing and what ad positions they are bidding on. And your competition will be doing the same thing.

People shouldn’t be buying these tools until they can make good money doing it manually. It’s not the skis, it’s the skier.

Interesting article. I recently joined UnderCover Profits when they launched. I monitored a lot of campaigns. Set up several that appeared to be running a long time so presumably profitable. I only managed to make 1 profitable and that has since stopped earning as probably more people discovered it too.
A lot of factors are involved, this software doesn’t tell you every keyword that people are using, it just monitors campaigns for the keywords that you think they may be using. There may be a lot more keywords that actually make the difference between this being a profitable or unprofitable campaign. I tried to get my ads to run at the same level as the ’swiped’ ad, ie if it was positioned 3rd for a keyword then that’s what you aim for. I still couldn’t make most of these campaigns profitable which just means that for some reason Google probably set the prices higher for me. Maybe the other person started off paying a lot more for his clicks so got a good ctr and was able to lower his bids over time. There are many factors that may be involved here and just finding long running ads are only a small piece of the puzzle.

The campaign that was successful then stopped making money. For some reason I was getting a similar amount of clicks but they weren’t converting. I noticed eventually that the guy that was successful with it originally, started running his ads just over the weekend from Thursday to Monday. One way to beat this monitoring software would be to pause your campaigns on quieter days as the software monitors for campaigns that are running continuously.

Jan

Rather than trying to “steal” a market away from someone else, I think my time would be better spent Blasting new campaigns to find my own niche markets. Once I find a profitable niche, it’s then up to me to expand the campaign, and stay on top of it by constant testing and improving. On the other hand, these tools will likely mean certain doom for the lazy marketer who thinks he can just “set it and forget it” and let those “obscene profits” roll in to his bank account, lol.

As ‘newbies’ into the wider marketing arena I have wasted a good amount of money in the past 4 months on ‘guaranteed income opportunities’. This included purchasing Keyword Analyser and Dominator which I am still to master and put into action.

The ’subject’ tool would certainly be attractive to someone starting out who hadn’t clicked with campaigns etc and just wanted to get to the cash end of town in a hurry.

While the marketers of this particular tool say it is legal I wonder if it is really ethical. Being ethical doesnt always fill your bank account but it makes you sleep better at night when you do it the hard way and succeed.

I have a problem with the principal of the software and it will be pricey as well. The next thing will be some ‘detective’ software that can scan others coveting their campaigns and enable a reverse attack to be mounted.

While they fight it out the ‘educated’ marketer will keep on keeping on with the tried and tested ‘high morale ground’ methods.

Just my thoughts as a ignorant newbie.

Keith Wilson