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A successful business will no doubt have competitors and needs to constantly innovate to stand out from them. A simple way of doing this is to see what your competitors are doing to get new business online and get ideas from those strategies to use in your own business. A start-up who is struggling to work out what to sell or how to position themselves in the market can also benefit from studying potential competitors, or the businesses they want to be like. No matter what stage your business is in, you can use the data from your competitors to understand what keywords to use to write content to be found via the search engines and how to position yourself online so new clients can find you. It is now incredibly easy to get the info you need with iSpionage. In this episode we introduce you to their Director of Marketing, Joe Putnam, who will share some insider tips about using competitor research.
Interested in doing this research for your business and feeling a little overwhelmed? Don’t let that stop you. We can help you navigate through the steps you need to do your own competitor research inside Digital Traffic Institute.
In this episode:
01:45 – The tool we are only using 10% of its capacity and still getting amazing results from
02:30 – Introducing the Director of Marketing from iSpionage, Joe Putnam
04:30 – How iSpionage works to help you understand what your competitors are doing online
05:30 – How to get access to your competitors keywords (paid and organic), ad copy and what their landing pages look like
07:20 – What does a business owner need to do for SEO these days to get results
11:30 – How important is blogging to the success of your website
15:45 – The pros and cons of Adwords vs Facebook ads
18:00 – Are Twitter ads worth it?
24:40 – Something Andrew uses iSpionage for that even Joe has not thought of
26:15 – How most people use it to research keywords (although Andrew’s idea is great too!).
28:25 – Hey agency owners and website experts! Here’s how to find local businesses who need your help.
32:30 – Steps you can take to launch a product online using iSpionage.
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BONUS VIDEO
TRANSCRIPTION
Andrew: On today’s podcast, we have a very special guest who’s going to show us exactly how you can spy on competitors and do competitor research. Hey everybody, welcome to podcast #110. My name is Andrew McCauley and we have a very special guest on today’s podcast. More on that in just a minute. Of course, Heather Porter joins me. Hello, H.
Heather: Hi Andrew. Hello everybody. We are so excited to bring you this guest. Oh my goodness. We’ve used this little piece of software in our business for a couple years and as Andrew said, it’s all about using other people’s information to grow your business. Woohoo!
Andrew: There’s lots of tools out there. There’s many, many different tools you can use, but this one we particularly like. We’ve road tested a number of them and we’ve been using this one, Heather, I think for nearly three years now and it certainly gives us a lot of information. In fact I’m going to say that we probably only use it around about 10% of its capacity and yet we still love it; we still want to use it all the time because just that 10% is giving us some really, really valuable information. I’m going to try and see if we can work out how we can even use it even more effectively from our special guest on today’s call.
Heather: Like always, guys, we hand-pick these guests because it’s also a selfish thing for ourselves. We want to ask them questions for our business and you just get to be a fly on the wall and hang out with us. And because I want to get stuck in and because we have so much to talk about Andrew, we’re just going to not talk about what we’ve learned over the last week, are we?
Andrew: We’re going to talk about this episode because this is where I’m going to learn and this episode is going to be fun.
Heather: Exactly. Cool, so who do we have?
Andrew: Our very special guest is Joe Putnam. He is the director of marketing in Ispionage. He has seven years of digital marketing experience and has worked on projects ranging from increasing SEO traffic 500% for a non profit organization all the way to boosting conversions up to 272% for start-ups. Hey Joe, welcome to our call.
Joe: Hi guys. Thanks for having me on and I really appreciate the unexpected endorsement. It’s great to be on the call.
Heather: It’s good to have you.
Andrew: Joe, it’s great to have you on. As Heather said, we don’t have a lot of guests on our show. For regular listeners, they know it’s usually just me and Heather talking backwards and forwards. But it’s great to have somebody else on because it just gives us a bit of a different angle and also gives us some expertise that we’ve been able to tap into without having to read a lot of stuff beforehand.
We’re really looking forward to digging in and finding out about what Ispionage does but more importantly about you and your journey too. So just give us a quick rundown about yourself and how did you get this role?
Joe: It’s a little bit of a long story but basically at some point I started really getting into digital marketing and I started writing about it, blogging about it and I emailed a guy named Neil Patel, I don’t know if you guys have heard of him before.
Andrew: Sure did.
Heather: Yes.
Joe: OK. Out of the blue I just emailed him and asked him to check out an article I wrote. He said he liked it. He asked if I would be interested in becoming a paid writer for one of the companies he owns — Kissmetrics — and so I started doing that and then just kind of started going down this path until eventually I was hired to work at Ispionage and that’s the short version of how I got to where I am today.
Andrew: Give us a quick rundown for those listeners that haven’t heard of Ispionage before. Just give us a quick overview and then we can dig in to it a little bit later because we’ve got a couple of questions — we want to lead in before that — but just give us an overview of what does the tool do?
Joe: So the technical term for it is we offer competitive intelligence. A little bit more specifically, most of our intelligence is based around PPC and SEO and we have a focus on PPC where some of the similar tools, they emphasize SEO. But we really want to be the best competitive intelligence tool for PPC that’s available. So what that means for everybody listening is we compile keyword data so what keywords advertisers are bidding on. We compile budget estimates and click estimates and we also have a database of all of the ad copy that different advertisers are using.
One thing that we started doing recently which is brand new and as far as I know nobody else is doing — we’re also saving screen shots of the landing pages that different advertisers are using. So essentially by signing up for the tool, you get access to your competitor’s keywords both PPC and SEO; you get access to their ad copy variations; you also can see screen shots of the landing pages and what their conversion strategy looks like.
Andrew: We just noticed that too, recently and we were getting excited. We were like kids in a candy shop.
Heather: We were.
Andrew: So for those that have never done anything like this of course it’s all highly legal; you’re not doing anything illegal. What you’re doing is giving insights into what competitors are spending money on when they run ads. Is it predominantly on AdWords or is it on all paid platforms?
Joe: We have data on AdWords being in Yahoo. Not all paid platforms, but we do cover the major search engines.
Andrew: So you cover what keywords that they are spending money on so that when somebody does a search on Google, that keyword is going to initiate an ad that’s popping up, right?
Joe: Correct.
Andrew: Cool. Speaking of AdWords and keywords, Heather, you got a couple questions you want to ask Joe about? Keywords.
Heather: I do actually.
I would like to just quickly talk about SEO because you were saying that your tool also helps with SEO and looking at keyword phrases that different companies are using. There’s so much conversation around SEO and literally earlier Andrew and I got an email from one of our clients and he was saying — I keep getting emailed from contact form on my website and people are like, you need to rank higher and get SEO. You know all the spam stuff that goes on.
Joe: [laughs]
Heather: But let’s really break it down for a business owner that has a website that’s looking for more traffic that’s heard about this SEO thing. What does a business owner need to concentrate on for both on-site — what do they need to do on their website — and then off-site for SEO?
Joe: Those are great questions and actually it’s funny that you mention the spam comments because every business I’ve been at — we always get those kind of inquiries and most people don’t know how to respond, but I trash pretty much all of them.
Heather: Yes. As we should.
Joe: I would just say when it comes to SEO there’s some very basic stuff you want to do on your site. If you know anything about SEO it’s very obvious. If you don’t know anything about SEO then it seems like kind of a magic trick.
Actually I’ve been talking to a really cool start-up in the based in Boston. I don’t want to say the name of the start-up now but they’re ranking actually for several terms that are really important for their business. They’re ranking like the third position and fifth position and their on-site optimization they actually haven’t done hardly anything with on-site optimization and their ranking well already. To me that was interesting to realize that if we just do some of this on site stuff then they should be able to jump from the third position or the fifth position to maybe the first position or second position. So that just goes to show how important it is to do your on-site optimization.
What does that look like? Maybe the basic things are your title tags for your site, making sure those are optimized with the right keywords you want to target. This example that I’m talking about, they’re ranking for very good terms but the title for their home page which is ranking for the terms, all it includes is the company name instead of putting keywords in the title and then at the end of it also including the company name. So big opportunity there.
The meta description — Google’s going to look at that and see if there are any keywords there. Then also the URL is something that Google looks at and those are some things that they are paying attention to — as long as the formula hasn’t changed overnight which it could have done.
But the other thing is on the page itself, making sure you’re using the keywords. Again, that seems obvious, but I’ve worked on SEO projects — actually that nonprofit I helped to increase traffic 500% — they were targeting a very obscure phrase for their business because that’s just what they liked; it was a little bit on the formal side. Whereas when people actually search, they search for something a lot more common, just a common phrase. So they were making the mistake of optimizing for a technical term and people were searching for a non-technical term. So that’s where the on site optimization comes in play so you want to make sure you check all those boxes so you give yourself the best chance to rank.
Andrew: That’s a good point you bring up. We get a lot of people saying we’ve got some industry jargon and we want to rank for industry jargon. That’s all fine if industry people are looking for you. But if you’ve got a common person looking for it but they don’t know what that industry jargon is then there’s really no point putting that jargon in there, is there?
Joe: Absolutely. Just to give you the specific example I’m referring to, the non-profit was optimizing — well unintentionally optimizing — for “free christian literature” so that’s what they had in a title tag for their website but as you can imagine, X thousand more people searched for “free christian books” than “free christian literature.” So overnight they went from — well, from ranking for “free christian literature” which no one is searching for to ranking for “free christian books.” So that’s an example where one word can make a very big difference.
Andrew: Yes.
Heather: Amazing. Still on the on-site topic, how important is blogging and adding ongoing content to your website?
Joe: I would preface this by saying I’m by no means an SEO expert. I think I have had some success with SEO, so maybe a little bit qualified to talk about it. But the project that I have been successful for, the one that Andrew mentioned earlier, increasing traffic 500% — and actually I think it’s gone up since then — had to do with creating content.
One way to look at it is — let’s say your website includes ten pages which is maybe — the average website’s maybe between five and ten pages — that means you have five to ten pages that can rank in Google for some keyword or another. But like you mentioned, if you create blog content and you target that blog content towards phrases that people are searching for, every single blog post you publish becomes a new page that can rank in Google.
This example of the traffic increasing 500% — we started out at about 2,000 organic visitors a month and went to 10,000 organic visitors — and I think it may have even doubled since then; I haven’t had visibility for a while — was just every week publishing a new blog post over a two year period. That additional content meant more opportunities to rank; the posts were targeted; it’s long form. So I would say as a not super qualified expert, I would say creating blog posts is one of the most important things if not the most important thing for generating more SEO traffic.
Heather: That’s definitely how we feel. I think you said it in such a cool way. Just think about the common sense about it. You have a five page website. What’s better? Five pages with five keyword phrases or a hundred pages with each different keyword phrases?
Joe: For most businesses the only way you’re going to get from 5 to 100 is writing blog posts versus creating individual pages.
Heather: Yes. Well said.
Can we talk a little bit about off-site before we move on to ads? So a little bit about off-site, do you know any strategies what somebody could do off their website to help with their SEO?
Joe: Actually that’s where my expertise stops. I haven’t done much with off-site. I have had success with just creating content and getting it shared socially and then that —
Heather: Brilliant.
Joe: — working, but I don’t have any special tips for getting links and things like that.
Heather: I’m so glad you said that. You know why Andrew? Because the whole SEO thing we always talk about is basically just optimize your website and write. Write on it; get blogs out there; use a plug in like WordPress SEO by Yoast; put all the keywords in the right places and you’ll see some results. I’m glad you said that because look at the results you’ve gotten just by focusing on on-site. You don’t have to go crazy with this if you don’t have a huge resource team or budget behind you.
Joe: Right. I completely agree.
Andrew: Hey, Joe, I want to flip over to ads then instead of doing SEO. Let’s talk about ads. What sort of ads would you consider to be the best to either get leads or sales? Actually let’s go with leads. What sort of ads have you seen work well that get the most leads, I want to know?
Joe: You mean ad platforms, or…
Andrew: There are ads… When we say ads — is it ads that are visual imagery ads? Are they just text ads? Are they banner ads? Do you keep a track of that sort of thing?
Joe: I don’t know that I have actually really good data on lead generation. I would say that I like different ad platforms for different reasons. It really depends on the project what you would want to do. I’m not sure if I have too much to add about that.
Heather: I want to know more about that last comment he made. I like different platforms for different reasons. I’d like to know more about that. Which platforms for what reasons?
Joe: Two examples would be AdWords versus Facebook. Some people are very pro AdWords and some people are very pro Facebook and they don’t like one or the other. But to me it depends on the project and that’s going to go for any ad platform. I don’t have anything against Pinterest ads or Instagram ads I think it just depends on what you’re trying to accomplish and what the specs are for the project.
As an example, AdWords is very good for businesses where people are actively searching for what you have to offer. So lets say you are a plumber. People don’t know they need a plumber until they need one and then as soon as a pipe bursts they’re going to type into Google plumber, mycityname, search. That’s a time when you want to show up at the very top of the results and one way to do that is to pay for the ad and be visible on AdWords so you can generate those leads. That’s an example where AdWords makes a lot of sense. but that’s just a simple example. Obviously you just kind of carry it over and consider other situations where — are people actively searching for what you have?
But there are certain products where maybe you are a new business, maybe you’re selling hats or something and people don’t know that your hats are available; they don’t know that your brand exists. Facebook is great for generating awareness around products that people are not specifically searching for or to solve a problem for. So Facebook — maybe like a local clothing store a clothing line of some sort… Any type of product where people aren’t actively searching for them. But if you target them demographically — you know that women in this age group with this certain demographic information is more likely to buy your product. That’s where Facebook definitely is much stronger than AdWords.
Andrew: If you’re talking about Facebook versus AdWords — can I throw another one in the mix? I know you’ve written a post on this recently and that’s Twitter ads. How do you find those? Are you finding they are as effective as Facebook or AdWords or do you think they’re just another platform and maybe try it to see if that fits for your business model?
Joe: I think it depends on the business model and the type of thing that you’re trying to do. There are some things I really like about the Twitter ads. The cook through rate was a lot lower than a lot of other ads that I’ve done. But we got really good impressions on the ads and you’re able to create a really nice Twitter card ad. I forget the dimensions but it’s a fairly large image that you get to add to your ad which means if even if someone doesn’t click or someone doesn’t become a lead directly from the ad you’re still getting that impression and they’re seeing some type of message about your business. The cost per click was pretty low compared to some of the stuff that for example we’ve done on AdWords. I don’t have a lot of information yet to say it performs a certain way and I love it for X, Y or Z reason but there were some things I really liked about it because I love that really strong brand impression; I love the fact that we’re getting a lot of impressions and I love the fact that the cost per click was lower because that’s always a good thing. So there’s definitely stuff I like about it.
Andrew: Where do you see the whole ad platform — not just Twitter — but ads in general, I mean we’re seeing Instagram have got ads, Pinterest have got ads although they’ve started to change their theory on ads it looks like. Where do you see this all heading in the next twelve months?
Joe: I’m not sure where I see it heading. But I think anyone who’s thinking about it, I personally think it makes a lot of sense to test all of them. Actually I’m working on a project now with a vacation home company in Anaheim, California. They have these gorgeous vacation homes that they rent out close to Disneyland. The company is called Twelve Springs, the web site’s twelvesprings.com.
We’re testing a lot of different platforms because we don’t know quite yet what works for vacation homes. But by spending a little bit on each we’re going to know which platform has the longest time on site and the most page views and results in the most bookings and things like that.
I don’t know that I have a prediction but I personally think that there’s a lot of awesome ad platforms out there and some of them make more sense for certain businesses than others. So either you want to indefinitely spend a little bit on each and get a benefit for different reasons or find the one that works for you and double down on that.
Andrew: You’re seeing a big increase obviously in mobile ads as well?
Joe: Yes. Definitely mobile traffic. For sure there’s an increase there.
Heather: Is there a difference — if I were to do an ad campaign and I wanted to target both desktop and mobile, should I be doing different things for each of those devices?
Joe: I’m not sure. That’s a very interesting question. I personally don’t do different things so now you have me thinking about whether or not I’m making a mistake and need to double check and find out if there’s a reason to do different ads.
Heather: I go in and do Facebook ads in the ads manager and there’s always the option to turn on and off mobile and then target devices attached to wifi and all that and I was just thinking I wonder if there’s a reason to do different messaging or anything around that.
Joe: One quick comment about that. I don’t have any super tips about optimizing for mobile specifically. But I would say it makes sense to pay attention to those types of numbers and just to know is it working; is it not working. So for example, I’ve run ads before on Facebook where I paid for a lot of sidebar impressions on Facebook but the sidebar impressions were not getting me results and I was paying too much for them. So I turned that off and I just did the news feed and then I got better results. So you definitely want to pay attention to the different aspects and making sure you’re not losing money about a certain aspect.
Another example would be on AdWords, let’s say you’re advertising for a site that’s not mobile-optimized. Within the AdWords platform you can see your results by device so you can see that you have this certain ad position on mobile devices and certain position on desktop; the cost per click is this; the click-through rate is that. Then within Google analytics you can see how that traffic’s performing based on devices. So if you’re not converting on mobile, one thing you can do in AdWords is you can actually decrease your bids on mobile so you don’t show up as often.
So that would be something where I haven’t personally optimized and found some way to get better results with mobile but I do think it’s very important to pay attention to those differences and scale something back if it’s not working.
Heather: Very good.
Andrew: Let’s turn our attention to Ispionage because I want to ask Joe a few questions about that because I know we’ve been using it maybe not as effectively as we have and maybe Joe can give us a few tips on some things that we may do, improve the way we use it and maybe some other things that we just don’t know that Ispionage does.
So Joe, basically the way we’re using it is once we log in we’ll put in a competitor’s domain name or a keyword or a couple of keywords and that will give us a series of results for different things like PPC keywords that that particular domain might be using or it will give us a list of ads that they’re running or different competitors that they’ve got. The main part that I use it for is to find what keywords they are ranking well for. Usually for not so much running ads against them but more, I’m using it for organic long tail keywords so I can create pages, like you were speaking about before, creating blog posts or new topics on a website around those long tail keywords. That’s one of the main things I’m using it for. Is that the right way to use it or is that just a small fraction of what it can be used for?
Joe: Actually, that’s something I haven’t heard of it being used for.
Andrew: There you go. I’m very creative.
Together: [laughter]
Joe: I would just add that I think it’s extremely smart so now you have me thinking about whether or not we should write a case study about that.
Andrew: Uh, a basket case that is for me.
Together: [laughter]
Andrew: So in any case, tell me then what should I be doing then instead, if I’m not doing that the correct way you think.
Joe: No. I think that’s really smart. I’m definitely going to look more into that. Just to add to that, I’ve heard of people who advertise on AdWords and they find the phrases that convert and the phrases that drive traffic through their search terms report in AdWords and then they’ll write long-tail content to target those specific phrases. Actually there was one marketer who, he works in the law firm space and by doing that, kind of what you’re doing but a little bit different, he was able to increase organic traffic. He generated 400,000 organic visits in a single year in a space where if he was bidding on AdWords for those terms he’d be paying maybe 25 to $50 per click. So what you’re doing is to me, I think, it’s just a slight variation from that. It sounds really smart.
The main way most people use it when it comes to keywords is they look at an advertiser; they see which terms they’re bidding on and then one of the things that they’ll do is maybe initially to create a campaign. Instead of starting from scratch you could start with keywords that another advertiser is bidding on.
So let’s say the vacation home company I mentioned before — You could look at the keywords that Airbnb is bidding on — and the last time I looked they’re bidding on something like 255,000 different keywords — so you could look at those, but obviously that’s not going to be targeted enough since the company’s based in Anaheim. So maybe you search in an excel spreadsheet for Disneyland or your search for Anaheim and you can pull out the keywords that make sense for your business from the 255,000 keywords that a satellite Airbnb is bidding on. In that regard the Ispionage data becomes a shortcut for your keyword research where instead of starting your campaign from scratch you’re finding the terms that other advertisers are already using.
Andrew: Another way that I was using it — and this is probably going back about six months or so ago — we’re doing some research for some local businesses and we were looking a their competitor’s ads and I was finding some of their ads which were… You know when you see ads that are — you just think, why are they wasting money sending people to a page that — like their home page for instance– it wasn’t a direct call to action where they’re asking someone to buy something or sell something they’re just sending them to a random blog post that wasn’t even being re-targeted. I saw some things like that and I’m thinking, wow these people are primed for me to calling up and say — you guys need some consulting because you’re wasting one heckuva lot of money on these ads.
I found it fascinating that I could see so many people running ads wrong. I was able to find them from your tool. So I thought that was another interesting way of using Ispionage as well.
Joe: Yes. I think we have a lot of people who use it that way. Either that direct way where you can qualify people and realize — hey, these guys, they’re spending 10,000 a month but they’re directing traffic to their home page so there’s a chance that they need somebody who can manage their campaigns and get better results for them.
Something else that people will do is — and I think this is awesome — it’s very, very helpful where you’re running an agency; someone contacts you and then wants you to run an AdWords campaign for them and in a matter of 30 minutes to an hour you can research their past campaign, see how they were converting their traffic, which keywords they were bidding on, you can look at their competitors and get a feel for who they are up against and how competitive it’s going to be. Then that data helps you to put a bid together. You’ll know exactly what kind of work is involved. Also it just helps to impress the client so that they feel like you know enough about their space. But the fact that you’re using Ispionage data to do that means you’re learning all of that much faster than if you had to compile spreadsheet upon spreadsheet of data by yourself.
Andrew: Definitely. One other way I found was interesting was, I was surprised at the amount of people that were hijacking other people’s names.
Heather: Explain what you mean?
Andrew: Let’s say a client, let’s call it Bob’s Pizza — let’s say Bob’s Pizza was the client. I would go type in their name as the keyword and I would find Mary’s Pizza and all these other fast food places locally using the keyword Bob’s Pizza as part of their ad so that when somebody was typing Bob’s Pizza into Google, Mary’s Pizza would pop up in the ads. So they were hijacking Bob’s Pizza without Bob even knowing that that was happening. So I found it fascinating that there was a lot of that sort of stuff going on too. I don’t know if it still goes on but it was interesting to see how clever and smart some people are or how cunning they are.
Joe: To me, it gets even more fascinating than that. We built a new feature recently in Ispionage to hide it so a specific example, anybody listening if they want to they can type in bigcommerce.com and if you do that and then you click on the landing pages tab within Ispionage which you can actually do for free just to test it out, one of the first pages that shows up for bigcommerce is — I’m looking at it right now — it says compare bigcommerce versus Shopify. The term they’re bidding for which we show in Ispionage is Shopify review. So not only are they hijacking Shopify’s traffic but they’re even taking people to page that compares bigcommerce to Shopify and I would imagine you kind of figure out which data points make you look better than the competition and you highlight those. I’ve seen that on more than one occasion where not only are they bidding on another brand’s keywords but they’re also targeting the other brand on their landing page.
Andrew: Mmm.
Heather: Brilliant. I have a question. If I were brand new to your tool. I have a website, I have some blogs going and I’m launching let’s say a brand new product and I go to your tool. How could I use that in the quickest way possible to get the best results to promote my product launch? What would be the steps you’d give somebody?
Joe: Is there anything else more specific to make it the exact…
Heather: OK. So an actual product? Um, let’s think of a product, Andrew.
Joe: Actually, what about a new yoga mat company.
Heather: I love it. Let’s do yoga mats.
Joe: OK. So let’s say you have a new store and you’re going to sell yoga mats that you’re importing from China. You found an awesome supplier for yoga mats and you’re going to start an e-commerce store.
The first thing I would do is I would actually enter in a keyword for yoga mats and start to get a feel for who the advertisers are in the yoga mat space. I’m going to be a little bit general here and just talk about it high level. But so you can look and see who the competitors are. That’s going to help you in a couple of ways. One of them is you know who you’re up against so if you do decide to run an AdWords campaign you know how much people are spending you know who is spending money on it who’s bidding on which terms.
Also you could find potential partnerships that way. So let’s say you not only want to sell yoga mats on your own website but you also want to sell them through other retailers. You might find some yoga mat websites you didn’t even know existed and ask them — would you like to carry my new brand of yoga mats? So you can find some partners that way.
That’s at the very high level just kind of learning more about the space; learning more about the niche. From there you can drill down and you can drill into particular advertisers. Obviously you want to look at someone like lululemon and you drill in and you see what keywords are they bidding on. You can download their entire keyword list and then you can sort through it and decide which terms actually make sense for your business and start with those terms.
I would also look at their ad copy and see what stands out, what makes sense. Find some things to borrow and also find some ways to stand out. Learn about how people write ad copy and what you can do to both differentiate and also swipe some good ad copy writing that people are already using.
The last thing is I would look at the competitors websites and their landing pages. I would see what their landing page conversion strategy is and then see if there’s anything I can learn there that would help me with my pages. So maybe for example, double checking and you see that they don’t drop their yoga mat traffic on their home page; they drop it on their yoga mat category page. So just kind of learning about the conversion strategy of different advertisers to see how you can step up your game a little bit.
I feel like those are the top things. I think there’s also ways to drill in from there.
Heather: I think that’s perfect. I just wanted as a big picture, understanding of your tool and how amazing it is. You just summed it up. You know what else, while you were saying that I was thinking why not use it to do market research prior to even launching new product lines to see if there’s already a big market for them.
Joe: Sure.
Heather: Pretty cool. Andrew, anything else from you?
Andrew: No. I just like the fact that you mention looking at copy — we get so many people saying — I don’t know how to write an ad; I don’t know what I need to put on my ad. The great thing about this tool is it gives you all the ads exact copy that these people are already using. It tells you how much, how many days they’ve been running this ad. If they’ve been running this ad for 500+ days, you know it’s obviously paying off for them. Grab the copy; utilize it; model it and then you’ve solved that problem of trying to work out how to write copy. That’s what I love about this tool. It’s so much information here, it’s powerful. Super powerful and awesome.
Heather: How much is it? Just so we can let everybody know. Because they are probably listening thinking, I really want to go in and check it out. How does it work to sign up?
Joe: There are different packages. The lowest package currently is $59/month. It’s a month to month service you sign up for you can cancel it at any time. We also have a 30-day money back guarantee, where as long as you don’t download too many keywords — and we have a certain number of keywords we have to limit there — as long as you don’t download a ton of keywords you can ask for your money back if you decide it’s not a good fit or whatever. Which just means it’s a great way for people to kick the tires and see if it is a good fit for them. The only reason we limit the keyword downloads is we’ve had people sign up before, download 50,000 keywords and then tell us they didn’t get anything out of it and we’re left scratching our heads wondering — you have at least 50,000 keywords out of it.
It starts at $59. The last time I checked — I think we still had this going on — if you sign up for a free account we have this special offer going on right now where you can get a 20% discount if you sign up within a 24 hour or 72 hour window. So if anybody’s listening and they do want to try it out for the 30-day trial period click the join for free button sign up for a free account and there should be a pop up that offers a 20% discount. So that’s a way to get that price down a little bit more from $59.
Then there’s other packages. So if you need more data you can get one of the higher packages if needed.
Heather: Cool.
Andrew: Awesome. So that’s Ispionage — ispionage.com — go and check it out. Hey, Joe, we have flown through. I can’t believe the time has gone. Thank you so much for jumping on and joining us today. We got a lot of information today. I’ve got lots of notes here I’m go and start implementing and looking at how else I can make my research a lot better. So really appreciate you jumping on today. Thank you.
Joe: Sure. Thank you again for having me on. I had a really good time and look forward to staying in touch.
Heather: Yay. And you guys, what we’re going to do is we’ll put a little bonus on our show notes. So we’ll have the transcription available for you from the show so you can down load it and start to action these things but also we’ll pop a little bonus video on our page, a little bit more about the platform itself and how we use it so you can kind of see behind the scenes and fall in love with it as much as we have fallen in love with it. As always, you can find that over at aybpodcast.com and this is episode #110 so look for that and we’ll have all sorts of goodies in that post for you.
Andrew: Awesome. Thanks Joe. Thanks Heather.
Heather: Thank you guys.
Joe: Thank you both.