Pay per click (PPC) is a great automated marketing method, but it is becoming more and more difficult. There are hundreds of thousands of advertisers out there trying to grab customers’ attention.

As an advertiser, you know that pay-per-click campaigns take a lot of trial and error. You set up your keywords, write your ads and track conversions until you find the right combination that works the best.

In the last few years, running an adword campaign has become very competitive. With the rapidly increasing number of advertisers in every niche, the click costs are also sky rocketing.

Beating adwords is a process and one of the most important steps of this process is to find your competitors. When you know who your competitors are and what they are doing, you can easily develop your own strategies and get a kind of competitive edge that is truly unbeatable.

There are two ways to go about it. First, you may like to do it yourself manually. Alternatively, you can let a PPC tool do everything for you and achieve quality scores with Google.

There is a tool called PPC Bully. It is a great example of an adwords spy tool where you enter the keywords you want to track and it tells you what ads are there, which ads are affiliate ads, how long the advertiser’s ad has been running etc. PPC Bully gives you this info and assigns a value to each keyword and to show which ads are profitable.

You can then go in, write a similar ad, set up your campaign and you should have a much higher success rate than the campaign blast method.

PPC Bully or any other similar tool is not a magic program to take all the work out of PPC, but it does make launching a successful campaign right off the bat much more likely.