A product of Rivergold Associates Ltd., it is definitely a research tool that every PPC advertiser needs to be acquainted with.
 
At the very least, take advantage of their free trial to see the power behind this product. If you are just beginning to use PPC, the free trial may offer you enough to get you started. You can subscribe later, when your campaign needs to be changed.

WordTracker is a subscription-based product that specializes in reporting the relative popularity and positioning of keywords.

The product provides you with information on keywords related to those you are already using, the number of’ times any keyword has appeared in their database, and typical misspellings.

It also shows how many competing pages exist for your chosen keywords from among the search engines it analyses.

In short, WordTracker is a tool that will help you immensely in choosing keywords that are not only right for your products and services, but are the most advantageous for your particular ad campaign.

It is simple to use, yet the information it provides is quick, accurate, and managed extremely well.

It takes almost all the guesswork out of which keywords are going to be most effective by showing you what keywords people are using when they searching for your type of business.

The website is clean, clear, and attractive. It is filled with information about the product and the company, and offers a quick tour of the features.

A recent addition is a ticker running along the top of the site with today’s most frequently searched keywords.

Although not inexpensive, WordTracker is a tool well worth the expense. A free weekly keyword report shows the top 500 most frequently searched keywords on the Internet, from a database of over 350 million search terms.

You call purchase longer lists if you wish, starting at $99 for the top 20,000 keywords.

If you are new to the PPC market or you are running a small campaign, you can subscribe to WordTracker for as short a period as one day for less than $10.

For those who are more involved or have larger campaigns, WordTracker subscriptions run weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly (maximum cost is about $270).

The company offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, with plenty of research to justify their use of metacrawlers as the basis for their database. Tutorials to help you wish with keyword selection cater to every level of Internet marketer.

Keywords: WordTracker,

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Because it is limited to Yahoo searches only, and has no real definition of what constitutes a “search,” it is of fairly limited use.

They also include a Link Popularity tool, which shows how many other sites are linking to yours, using information gathered from AltaVista, Hotbot, MSN, and Google.

Although the mechanism for calculating the figures isn’t provided, this is certainly an interesting option.

A new version is due to be released soon that will offer enhanced features, most still free, but some of which will have a cost associated with them.

The key aspects to the next version of Good Keywords are a keyword organizer, a web page explorer (no details provided on exactly what that entails), a misspelled keyword generator, and a keyword phrase builder, in addition to the site and link popularity checkers.

Softnik Technologies hopes that by visiting the Good Keywords site you will become interested in their paid product, PPC, Toolkit.

Available on another website, PPC Toolkit includes Bid Reporter pro, a tool that studies the patterns of bidders and identifies just who those bidders are at search engine properties, including “Yahoo, Espotting, FindWhat, and others.”

It also includes a product called “AdMaker” and Good keywords, for a package price.

When one runs a keyword through the tool, PPC Bid Reporter Pro returns a report containing information on the first, last and median bid at various search engines, and the ranking of the keyword in 12 different search engines.

It will also show you competitor ads on Google AdWords (based on keyword) so you can tweak your own ad to compete more effectively.

You can also save different scenarios to Excel spreadsheets and download them for comparison later.

The Softnik websites have undergone recent redesigns with nice changes made to clearly offer the PPC Toolkit as a separate item.

With good screenshots showing the various products and short, but clear, explanations, the tools are easy to understand, but do not appear to offer as many functions as similar tools.

For example, there is no auto-bidding feature or automatic notification of a dip in the ranking of your ad.

A free download trial of the PPC Toolkit is offered, which is strongly suggested before purchasing this tool.

It costs $99 for a single user license (good for two years worth of upgrades) and $195 for a site wide license.

Keywords: Good Keywords, keywords.

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If you purchase this product directly from MarketingRocket.com, you also receive a number of add-ons, including another tool called Ad Calculator and an ebook entitled “Free Pay-Per-Click Advertising and Other Secrets,” all for $97.

Pay-Per-Click Galaxy’s stated main purpose is to suggest a “massive number of keyword combinations” for the pay-per-click user to bid on for his or her ad campaign. How does it do this?

First, keep in mind that this is merely a tool. You, yourself, have to enter in the different words you want to use in your keyword phrases; what Pay-Per-Click Galaxy does is provide you with all possible combinations of those individual words into keyword phrases.

You can mark some keywords as optional for the phrase, if you wish to. The tool itself generates keyword combinations of all kinds based on your descriptive keywords, usually coming up with hundreds or thousands of short keyword phrases.

The actual number depends on how many keywords you told it were to be always included and which were optional.

This tool is a huge timesaver for busy users because it almost instantly comes up with a list of keyword phrases without you having to go through the manual effort of writing them down all yourself in their various permutations.

The software also has various functions built into it that make it easier to organize keyword phrases for submission to search engines.

The database currently has over 15,000 keywords and 94,000 keyword/phrase relationship listings.

A December 2004 enhancement added the ability to drill further down and receive more keyword choices, based on each of the keywords the tool initially finds for you.

Pay-per-Click Galaxy is really the only independent tool available that automates the process of keyword selection.

All you need to do is pick and choose from the lists generated (based on bid price for these keyword phrases), save the ones you want to use, and submit them to your PPC search engine(s) of choice.

Even though many PPC, search engines now offer a keyword suggestion tool, Pay-Per-Click Galaxy does automate the process more than most.

As well, as an independent product, it can act as a “click:” on your search engine’s performance in this realm for a relatively low cost.

Keywords: Pay-Per-Click Galaxy, ppc.

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A typical report shows the cost of the keyword in up to six positions along with the amount of time it takes for a PPC ad to appear on the search engine.

You can adjust the parameters of your search in various ways, including which search engines to show, the number of positions per keyword, and a setting to ignore engines that take longer than a given number of seconds to respond.

The information provided can be very useful for checking out current costs across a number of the leading smaller search engines: Kanoodle, Enhance Interactive, GoClick, PageSeeker, Espotting, ePilot, FindWhat, Brainfox, and Bay9. Unfortunately, only these nine search engines are currently available.

Compare Your Clicks’ home company also offers some controversial software for purchase that, if you choose to use it, may cause PPC search engines to disable your accounts if detected.

One product is Search Engine Cloaker, a type of software not generally tolerated by search engines.

The website cautions that “Of course, you may not use Cloaker to deceive end-users through “page jacking,” “mouse-trapping,” or other techniques that promote keywords totally unrelated to the site end-users ultimately see. Cloaker is a powerful tool that must be used responsibly and ethically.”

Another product offered is Ranking Spy, which not only reveals search engine information on ranking, but can be set up to crawl your competitors’ websites, and reveal their targeting strategy.

They also provide a link to a product called TrafficSwarm, which apparently increases the traffic to our site by leaps and bounds.

An on-site forum reveals that those who use these programs are very happy with the results, and the company’s owner is very quick to respond to any questions concerning installation or set-up on an individual website.

If these products work as promised, they are relatively inexpensive and the level of support is certainly good.

The free tool, Compare Your Clicks, is a great option for advertisers, but caution is advised if you choose to integrate their other products into your ad campaigns, not just in terms of cost or effectiveness, but in how their use may affect your reputation or ranking in search engines.

Keywords:clicks,

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Many search engines work on this problem as part of your agreement with them, some more successfully than others.

So, if you suspect a problem but your provider doesn’t agree that there is one, you may wish to use this tool to back up your claim.

This product has an interesting history, in that an individual who suffered from click fraud himself in his PPC campaigns founded it.

Who’s Clicking Who works with all PPC, search engines because you add the code needed to install tracking (as well as placing code on the pages of your site that you want to track).

Even if your PVC search engine already tracks click fraud, you may wish to try out Who’s Clicking Who to compare the two results.

This product tracks clickthroughs in a variety of ways, including IP) address, placing a unique number string (usually via a cookie) in an individual’s browser, as well as tracing time stamps of transaction times, keywords used, and search engines used.

User location and information on the browser and operating system, as well as the name of the PPC, search engine from whence the click came, and the keywords used to reach your site, are also usually available.

As part of your subscription, you will also have access to IP histories in order to catch more subtle forms of click fraud, and you will have the ability to set up custom reports.

One of their products, ClickMinder, is activated after five repeated clicks on your website, sending a pop-up window (which you can customize) to the user informing them they arc being audited, couched in terms that won’t appear threatening if it is a legitimate user, but alerting click-fraud operators that you are monitoring your PPC ads.

Free installation is available, and if you feel you have a click fraud problem, this tool is worth the investment, with a one-month subscription currently costing just under $50 for 50,000 clicks per month.

Additional groups of 10,000 clicks can be purchased for $10 each per month, if you have a lot of traffic on your site. Until PPC search engines completely solve the click fraud problem themselves, PPC users need tools like Who’s Clicking Who to protect their investment.

Keywords: Who’s Clicking Who, tool.

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The tool also tracks ad campaigns in other settings such as email ad campaigns, banners, affiliate links, search engine results, and even offline advertising.

Clicklab’s website concentrates on click fraud, with a free white paper on the subject. The click fraud detection tool is quite robust, including an innovative product called the Click Inflation Index, “calculated as the ratio of fraudulent visitor sessions to the total number of visitor sessions and is expressed as a percentage.”

Fraudsters are identified via a scoring algorithm that suspects click fraud above a certain score threshold. They also provide a warning message popup with repeat paid clicks on your ad.

This product goes well beyond click fraud detection, however, to offer a full array of web analytics and tracking.

Using what they have identified as Key Performance Indicators (KPI), the user can customize their needs by choosing from dozens of available KPIs, including ones that analyze data by date, landing page, ROI, traffic source, search engine keyword, referring URL, and others.

In fact, almost any aspect of tracking the performance of your ad is covered in one wav or another.

One can track all the way down to the individual visitor to your website to see where they went and if the path they took led to a conversion. Post-visit analysis is included, as is the ability to view visitor segmentation.

Clicklab uses ASP and thus is a hosted solution, with no need to download or set up anything. Access to your statistical information is available 24/7 via their website.

There is no doubt that a lot of time, thought, analysis, and scientific theory has gone into the development of the Clicklab tool.

Clicklab is not necessarily a low-cost option, and fees have recently increased, with a standard $1110 activation fee added as well.

Conflicting information on the website makes it unclear as to which pricing is currently in place.

For example, Web Analytics (which doesn’t include click fraud detection) is said to cover three websites and up to 60,000 page views for $60 per month, while on time general pricing page the Web Analytics package is priced at eight sites and 300,000 page views for $60/month. Support is offered with a 48-hour turnaround guarantee, but phone support is charged per incident.

Long a standard in web analytics, Clicklab is definitely worth investigating as a full service analytics solution.

Keywords: Clicklab, click fraud,

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During 2004, the product was improved with added reports on number of click throughs, number of sales or leads, sales revenue, ad spending (if any), conversion rate, and ROI. Tracking of offline ads is available as a custom feature.

Unfortunately, if you use log files, there is a one-day delay before you can view reports based on the data.

Using cookies and Java-based code, KeywordMaxTM, offers data feeds from PPC, search engines Google AdWords, FindWhat, Yahoo, Ah-Ha, and Kanoodle.

The four major features include “ROI Tracker,” which handles all types of online campaigns, including shopping sites.

“Click Auditor” only uses IP addresses to detect fraud, but does offer to send an email to your competitors to capture their IP address.

“Bid Director” manages your keywords aggressively from every aspect, including offering currently controversial jamming and gap surfing.

“Keyword Builder” suggests alternative keywords and then estimates how much traffic you can expect, based on data from Google and Yahoo.

Available reports are very appealing visually, but do not include all expected data. You call track all factors, including leads, and compare the performance of multiple PPC search engines.

Reports can also be sorted by keywords, landing pages, different search engines, and so on. Novices may find the reports difficult, at first.

Two main products are available. The first, “Merchant Standard” ($99/month), does not include “Bid Director” and is limited to 75,000 clicks/month and one domain name, although you can add extra domains at $10 each and pay for additional clicks.

The second, “Merchant Pro” ($199/month), doubles the number and type of clicks to 150,000 per month (clicks counted are only bid change activity and ROI clicks, which oddly are described as “ROI Tracker tracks each visitor to your site as 1 click”).

Extra clicks and domains cost the same as in the standard version. From here, you call choose from two agency-related packages at up to $999/month, whose major advantage is branding tracking.

A page that that compares the KeywordMaxTM features is interesting, but only includes Yahoo Search Marketing and GoToast (now Atlas OnePoint), and doesn’t Include other, more relevant competitors.

A handy resources page provides links to three free SAO tools, as well as articles on various topics.
Keywords: KeywordMaxTM ,

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ClickTracks offers a large number of visual demos, and tutorials on the features of the different versions of the product, as well as extremely useful free webinars that allow advertisers to see all the product’s features (not all of which are included in the free trial version).

Reports are the strong suit of ClickTracks. While viewing a report, your live website appears, with percentage-style statistical analysis tags superimposed on the various links on your site.

Clicking on one will bring up all relevant details related to the type of report you are viewing, be it navigation or a total site overview.

The software compresses log files when importing your data, so different factors can be added to and recalculated within seconds, in any report.

“Labels” is a key feature, allowing you to identify a group of visitors and analyze their activity based on specific behavioral actions.

For example, you can drill down to data on visitors who spent only a short time on your site, seeing where they went, how they entered your site and from which page they left, all of which may prompt you to experiment with the website to see if you can change visitors’ behavior.

You can view different label groups side-by-side in reports.

A nice feature is the ability to keep some IP addresses out of the dataset, allowing you to exclude employee clicks while they are working on the site.

In addition, ClickTracks Way, which offers contextual-based tips on each page, can be enabled or disabled quickly.

Late in 2004, ClickTracks added the ability to track metrics on email marketing, exit tracking (did the visitor exit or just click on an external link), and regional geographic data, which can be set at city level.

ClickTracks admits that integration with shopping sites and shopping carts can be problematic (especially for novices) because of extra coding needed.

They advise you to contact your shopping cart provider to achieve proper integration.

ClickTracks offers direct downloads of Yahoo and Google data, while for other search engines, you may choose to use either raw data logs or hosting data.

Your choice affects pricing-choosing log files means you pay a flat purchase price; choosing hosting results in a monthly fee.

Although pursuing the small-to-medium-sized business market, cost remains an issue. Users do not have access to key items, such as ROI and cookie tracking, or to multiple domains, unless they use the “professional” versions, costing $179 per month for the hosted version (versus a flat $2,995 for your own web server).

The lowest price is $49/month for Analyzer Hosted, a much less robust tool. ClickTracks is definitely an excellent product, but price remains a stumbling block for many PPC advertisers.

Keywords: ClickTracks,

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AdWatcher is a full-service tracking tool that can analyze any type of online ad campaign, and I must admit that the number of tracking features is impressive for such a low-cost tool.

Click fraud monitoring is done by analyzing the incoming traffic for suspicious patterns, alerting you of the potential fraud that may be taking place via email.

It also displays warning messages to repeat offenders notifying them that the campaign is being monitored.

The tracking part of the software is extremely precise. It can even filter duplicate leads/sales and clicks, which in turn improves accuracy.

It offers complete support of all major search engines, which makes keyword tracking a breeze.

Another feature worth mentioning is its split-test tracking (allows you to track multiple landing pages to see which perform better), which is something only higher-priced products usually offer.

They offer transparent link tracking, a feature that allows you to Use your domain name rather than AdWatcher.com for your tracking links.

Customizable email reports are available, which makes it easier for small business owners to always be aware of what’s going on.

It is coupled with an impressive feature that allows the user to access their account via a WAP-enabled phone or a PDA from anywhere on the road, instead of having to wait until you are back at your office or home.

For those who do not want to depend on someone else when it comes to marketing, or who have large advertising budgets, the AdWatcher Download version allows you to install their tracking software onto your servers.

This is a great option for those who prefer to do everything in-house, rather than use third-party software, but without all the costs associated with developing your own system.

Multiple options are offered when it comes to customer support. AdWatcher will even help you set up your account and campaign group tracking for free, allowing you to start tracking your acts within a few hours.

Lastly, AdWatcher costs only $19.95 per month with a 30-day free trial. All that, backed up by the Company’s experience, reputation, and a money back guarantee, makes AdWatcher a perfect tool for any small business.
Keywords: AdWatcher, tracking tool,

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An automated tracking tool that manages keyword bidding on your ads on 29 PPC search engines, they are an approved partner of Yahoo.

The company also offers other solutions, including ProfitTracker for ROI tracking, ShopTracker for shopping site advertisers, and customized PPC consultation.

There are four key components to PPCBidTracker: BidSleep lets you lower your bids to the engine’s minimums during some days or times of the day.

If phone contact is your primary means of contact with potential buyers, with BidSleep you can set your bids to “sleep” during the times your salespeople are not available, and then re-enter the bidding when they are.

AutoEnhancer manages auto bidding on Yahoo or FindWhat to ensure you do not pay your maximum bid. This tool not only adjusts your maximum bid accordingly, but keeps it hidden from your competitors.

BidCat allows you to categorize your keywords by product, bid price, or many other options.

The BidSaver feature allows you to set up conditions under which the tool will automatically look for rankings that will save you money and not follow the “rules” you set into effect if the result will be a new ranking that is just a little below your competitors, but half the price, for example.

By itself, this tool is only one part of an analytics solution, albeit a fairly robust one. It is relatively expensive, with cost based on a combination of the number of keywords and the number of times per day you want them checked.

Monthly cost can range from $49.95 for tinder 50 keywords checked 6 times per day, to a maximum of 10,000 keywords checked 48 times per day for $9,999.95, for U.S. search engines (Google, Yahoo, FindWhat, Enhance, Kanoodle, ePilot and Searchfeed.

International search engine coverage is a minimum of $39.95/month and a maximum of $1,199.95, but only for some of the Yahoo and Espotting international versions.

PPCBidTracker has been very popular with users in the past, but recent changes that separate tracking and individualized consulting into different products may impact that.

The website is confusing in describing the situation, however. The BidTracker section still includes pages on how it covers ROI tracking and custom solutions, yet they are represented as separate products under different categories.

However, there is a 14 day free trial for either (or both) of their versions, if you wish to look more closely at this product. Keep in mind that it is a relatively expensive tool for its functionality.

Keywords: PPC, Bid, Tracker,

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